Mariella Frostrup: What do you fear most?

The question

Originally asked

Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire

The exact prompt is fixed in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire and independently sustained in The Guardian's The Q&A over multiple decades.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Mariella Frostrup

Recorded said elsewhere, not written here

Both my grandmother and my mother got dementia. My grandmother has passed away. My mother is in a home. Dementia is my biggest fear because it robs you of the very thing that makes life special.

The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 November 2023 source ↗

Others on this question

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John Lithgow

Climate change, duh.

Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, October 2024 source ↗

Kiell Smith-Bynoe

A plane that I’m on plunging into the sea. Aside from that, pigeons.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 12 August 2023 source ↗

David Chang

Figuratively doing nothing.

Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, September 2019 source ↗

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

That we will be remembered as a people who locked our fellow citizens in cages and who believe that some people are rich and some people are poor because “it’s their nature” and that racism and poverty are inevitable parts of the order of things; that M.L.K. and Bobby Kennedy died in vain; and that no one any longer believes what M.L.K. said in his Nobel Prize address in Oslo: “There is nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it.”

Recorded Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, March 2019 source ↗

More from Mariella Frostrup

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Question What most recently moved you to tears? Identity & self

Reading a newspaper.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 November 2023 source ↗

Question What period or moment in your life brought you the most joy? Time & hindsight

During the first three months of the first lockdown. I was at home with my family and I was such a cliche: I was baking sourdough, making my own granola. It was an idyllic time.

Recorded The Q&A, The Guardian, 4 November 2023 source ↗