Quickly, without warning, maybe even in my sleep, and while we're putting in requests: before I lose my mind and my ability to gallop across the countryside on horseback.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 2 March 2018 source ↗
The question
What kind of death would you consider a good one?Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
A fixed final question in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire, repeated verbatim across respondent pages.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Others on this question
View all 43 →
Henry Marsh
Neurosurgeon and writer
Sufficiently well to see Johnson and Truss and then two or three days later, she’s dead. I thought, that’s fantastic. That’s something to celebrate. That’s a great death.
Neil Patrick Harris
Actor
Quickly and by surprise. I don’t want the specter of death to linger.
Sally Field
Actor
When I’m extremely old during a huge family celebration where everyone is playing games and giving pre-written toasts … to me.
George Saunders
Short-story writer and novelist
Read incorrectly, that sounds like a threat. No thanks, Vanity Fair !
More from Sally Mann
View profile →On the island of Bequia—one summer, out of the blue, a benefactor (thank you, Charlene) flew our entire family there and put us up in a cliffside house that was a weird mixture of Gaudí and Fred Flintstone and where we went to sleep at eight and got up at five. In between we read, swam, hiked, and unknowingly enjoyed the last moment before the irrevocable shear of adolescence set in.
Reading. And, in particular, reading on the deck of the cabin while my children play in the river below.
Knowing when to show up and when to go home.
The loss of a child.
More on death & what remains
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- How close have you come to dying? 209 answers
- What song would you want played at your funeral? 178 answers
- If you had only one day left, how would you spend it — and what would you deliberately avoid? 54 answers
- What do you believe happens when we die? 50 answers
- What would you most want to leave your children? 44 answers
Also answered this
Judy Blume, John Lewis, George Saunders, Hans Zimmer, Joan Rivers, Alice Waters
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- The The Proust Questionnaire questionnaire — 5 questions from the same format
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