The question
What do you fear most?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.
We live in a fearful age: Brexit, Covid, global warming, cancel culture, war in Ukraine. Add in pancreatic cancer and you find me in an advanced and complex state of anxiety.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 April 2022 source ↗
Losing my mind and not knowing it.
I think that loss of speech, and of understanding of speech, and of understanding of writing, and of coherent writing – these losses will amount to the loss of my mind. I know what this feels like and it has no insides, no internal echo. Mind means talking to oneself. There wouldn't be any secret mind surviving in me.
Dying when my children are still young. I know how much it hurt me. I was 30 when my mum died and 39 when my dad died, and even then, that was too young.
That we will have waited too long to save the earth from environmental catastrophe.
The film of Restoration. A beautiful cast. An award-winning designer. A massive budget. A dog’s dinner.
The only drink I really, really like is champagne.
When I first met Richard, in 1992, on a British Council writers’ tour of Adelaide. We were drinking Australian lager while parakeets squawked rudely in the neighbourhood gumtrees.
A cream suit from Chanel that cost almost as much as a small car.
Working as the assistant to an agony aunt on a women’s magazine. When we didn’t get enough heartbreaking letters, we made them up.
Meryl Streep. For all her truthful and perfected offerings that have taken me to an “elsewhere”, in which my mind could feel both soothed and stimulated.
Fran Lebowitz, Fay Ripley, John Grisham, Harlan Coben, Kathy Lette, Julian Clary
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