Talking too much.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
What do you consider your greatest achievement?
Craft & work
Question
If you could edit your past, what would you change?
Failure & regret
Question
Aside from a property, what is the most expensive thing you have bought?
Money & investment
Question
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Time & hindsight
Question
When were you happiest?
Time & hindsight
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
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.
Having no purpose.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 28 January 2023 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 256 →
Zadie Smith
Novelist and essayist
Violent death. Death generally.
Personal: health. Globally: nuclear weapons.
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.”
More from Helen George
View profile →To still be working.
Going through a divorce.
A grandfather clock for my partner’s birthday.
To let things go.
As a child playing in my parents’ garden in Birmingham, which they still have, and where my daughters play, swinging on my swing that my dad made for me.
When I was young, I was pretty reckless – my 20s were quite hedonistic. I don’t know whether I’ve been close to death, but I may have been without realising.
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