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.
I’m afraid of the dark.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 1 November 2025 source ↗
Waking up after a sleepover at John Waters’s house and finding my sleeping bag isn’t zipped up the same way as when I passed out. Or “President Palin.”
It was desperate because of certain things, ingredients like my father being an alcoholic, my mother having too many babies in too short a time, no work available in Ireland, and even when my father did get a job he drank the wages. Then there was the harsh kind of schooling we had with school masters who ruled with a stick and then because of the overwhelming presence of the church, which imbued us with fear all the time. So it was fear, dampness, poverty, alcoholism, fear of the church, fear of the school masters, fear in general.
A crippling accident.
Totalitarianism in Europe.
A pair of Back to the Future shoes. They were auctioned off for Michael J Fox’s Parkinson’s charity, so I bid and I won. I am a huge fan of the films and if there was ever a pair of shoes I should own, it was those.
On stage with my band.
I was in Oliver! when I was 10 and I peed myself on stage in front of however many people the Palladium holds. It was the stuff of nightmares.
People who aren’t polite.
Seeing my kids getting older scares me.
Very complicated.
Rita Wilson, Helen George, Jimmy Kimmel, Joseph Fiennes, Jason Manford, Timothy Hutton
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