The question
If you could revise one chapter of your past, what would you change?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Repeated verbatim in The Guardian's long-running Saturday Q&A; two publisher-hosted examples establish recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
I’m not thrilled with my lack of commitment to feminism in my 20s.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 22 November 2025 source ↗
I would try to work on being able to trust people more easily.
Nothing: the good times, the bad times, they make your character.
So many times I’ve wondered what might have happened to me if I had lost my legs, or even just my right one, where my first melanoma appeared two or three years later. If I’d just been a second slower stepping away from the car, I might not be dying now. I’d be legless, of course, but still in good health. Of these fateful forks in the road are our lives made up. We are all just a millimetre away from death, all of the time, if only we knew it.
I wouldn’t because everything is connected with everything else.
Sacrifice the self and you will gain it. Serve the self and you will lose it.
Human, evolving and faithful.
Earnest, driven, Gemini.
A lifelong sleepover.
Greed, lack of empathy. Same thing.
I’m the happiest right now. I can see that I’m in a kind of sweet spot: my parents are alive, my kids are little, my wife is hot and my body doesn’t hurt.
Bill Bryson, Alison Moyet, Kim Wilde, Courtney Pine, Bryn Terfel, Gregory Porter
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