Lazy, anxious, and distracted.
Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, 18 September 2006 source ↗
The question
How would you describe yourself in three words?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's weekly The Q&A repeatedly uses this exact standing prompt.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Others on this question
View all 129 →Hardworking, authentic and honest.
Natural, caring, thoughtful.
Impulsive, enthusiastic, determined.
Curious, thoughtful and kind.
More from Margaret Atwood
View profile →Anonymous. She’s working to make the planet greener.
Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.
Begrudging mean-spiritedness.
At what age? It’s been a long path. I’ll stick with Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell. (“Someday I’d like to try a book like that,” I said to myself, “only with a female narrator. It would of course be quite different.”)
That human beings will follow their stupid and greedy side, rather than their smart side, and go down the plughole. We’re circling the rim.
Where to begin? How about working the archery range at the Sportsman’s Show in 1956? “The pointy part of the arrow goes at the front.” Or going door-to-door in 1963, when I was a questionnaire re-writer for a market research company, asking a 36-page questionnaire about bowel movements for a laxative company. “No one is going to answer 36 pages on that!” I bleated. “They’ll kick me out after three pages!” “Ah, but those who don’t,” they said – “those are our target market!”
More on identity & self
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Neil Gaiman, Arlo Parks, Alain de Botton, Adam Zagajewski, Andrew Ridgeley, Ardal O'Hanlon
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