Perfectionism that leads to procrastination.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
Question
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Values & belief
Question
What is the worst job you have done?
Craft & work
Question
What does love feel like?
Relationships
Question
What has been your biggest disappointment?
Failure & regret
Question
Aside from a property, what is the most expensive thing you have bought?
Money & investment
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 ↗
Others on this question
View all 256 →Not being able to work.
Dying alone and in pain.
Crashing in an aeroplane into an ocean at night.
More from Rose Tremain
View profile →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.
Talking in cliches. We have the most economic, resonant and versatile language in the world, yet so many people use it in a dull and boring way.
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.
Like coming home.
The film of Restoration. A beautiful cast. An award-winning designer. A massive budget. A dog’s dinner.
A cream suit from Chanel that cost almost as much as a small car.
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- The The Proust Questionnaire questionnaire — 5 questions from the same format
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