The question
What did you want to be when you were growing up?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
This is a standing question in The Guardian's decades-long The Q&A and also recurs independently in career and life interviews.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
A teacher and a nightclub singer.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 17 February 2024 source ↗
When I was very little, I thought it might be possible to be an angel.
An obstetrician.
I wanted to be a fur trapper. No young kid dreams of becoming a businessman.
An actor – that’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. I went to stage school when I was 13.
When I started as a researcher in the BBC, I was working for an editor who was a self-confessed misogynist. He used to practise shooting by aiming his air gun at an aerosol can balanced just over my head. I made it a matter of pride not to flinch as the pellets whizzed by.
My hybrid car. Not glamorous, not fast, but indispensable.
Possible dementia.
Young, beautiful, deluded.
To everyone I’ve bored.
Like intoxication, sometimes followed by a hangover.
Sonia Sotomayor, J.K. Rowling, Tamsin Greig, Anne Enright, Peyton Manning, Dervla Kirwan
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