SS
Before I was born.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 21 June 2014 source ↗
The question
What period or moment in your life brought you the most joy?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Asked in 52 of the 131 consecutive instalments of The Guardian's The Q&A harvested on 2026-08-29.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Others on this question
View all 577 →
Shaun White
American snowboarder and skateboarder
Easy – winning the gold medal for the men's half-pipe in Vancouver.
Maggie O'Farrell
Irish-British novelist
Last summer, swimming in a waterfall in Cumbria with my daughters.
Playing the Cowardly Lion in our fourth-grade production of The Wizard of Oz. Thank you, Mr. Riccobono.
Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen
English interior designer and television personality
This is going to horribly upset my wife, my children and my grandchildren, but it was when I did The Greatest Snowman last year for Channel 4. Being let loose on an Austrian mountainside to build snow sculptures was my happy point, and who knew I’d find an icy G-spot at nearly 58.
More from Sam Shepard
View profile →That's a hard one. All of the great writers whom I admire have died. I guess the most recent one would be Márquez.
Maybe Kate Moss.
More on time & hindsight
- What lesson has mattered most in your life? 138 answers
- What counsel would you give your twenty-year-old self — and what should they ignore? 78 answers
- What worries you about getting older? 61 answers
- What counsel has proved most valuable to you? 28 answers
- If you could put a message on a giant billboard, what would it say and why? 25 answers
- What line from a parent, teacher, or mentor do you still repeat to yourself? 23 answers
Also answered this
Jaime Winstone, Lance Black, Cybill Shepherd, Robson Green, Joanne Froggatt, Kwame Kwei-Armah
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All time & hindsight questions
- The The Q&A questionnaire — 25 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject