Jane Asher
English actress and author
Minding not being liked.
Which trait do you most dislike in yourself?
Question
What is the worst job you have done?
Craft & work
Question
Which book are you ashamed not to have read?
Taste & recommendation
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
Question
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Values & belief
Question
What most recently made you cry?
Identity & self
Question
What is the worst thing anyone has said to you?
Failure & regret
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's The Q&A has retained this Proust-derived prompt from at least 2007 through 2026, and ABC independently put it to the Obamas in 2011.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
My internalised misogyny that still manages to cloud some of my thinking.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 29 November 2025 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 243 →Flashes of hubris.
My ability to invariably say exactly the wrong thing in any given situation.
Intermittent laziness.
More from Rebecca Lucy Taylor
View profile →At a pub in Rotherham. I was a really bad waitress and I ended up being demoted to chopping the potatoes and I even got fired from that.
I never finished The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir.
I had some gynaecological issues that were very sudden, about 18 months ago, and felt that I might be dying. I wasn’t but it was quite serious.
People who can’t wait to argue.
On stage at the Brixton Academy on the third night of the residency I did there. I walked out and could not stop crying, some sort of mad relief that it’s all paid off and it’s all been worth it.
I was recently made to feel that it’s my mental health that’s the problem and not the system.
More on identity & self
Also answered this
Kevin Bacon, Layton Williams, Carl Barât, Clare Bailey Mosley, Róisín Murphy, Hugh Skinner
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