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.
To be completely alone.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 13 June 2026 source ↗
The loss of physical, financial, and psychological independence.
Endless vomiting. That comes from my emetophobia, which is a huge part of my OCD.
Running out of options.
Of choking on some food and having no one nearby to do the Heimlich maneuver.
Ulysses – I’ve tried many times and never got through it.
I cry all the time. It’s embarrassing. I mostly cry when my children perform something at school. My wife regularly says, “Do you see any other fathers weeping?” But I can’t stop myself.
Never ever think that things are going to turn out all right.
A review of Phèdre said – because I was quite large at the time – Toby Stephens’s Hippolytus needs to get on a StairMaster.
There was a very large part of my 20s where I was an alcoholic, and an addict. When I lost my dad to cirrhosis, I knew that the only difference between us was that, tragically, he couldn’t stop whereas I could.
I was in a restaurant with my daughter in Los Angeles and I had an accident involving a stomach upset. That was mortifying for both of us.
Sofia Coppola, Stephen Fry, Sally Mann, Patrick Stewart, Helena Bonham Carter, Cory Taylor
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