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I would have articulated aloud the comments I too often suppressed out of deference to arrogant, condescending, sexist bores.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 19 August 2017 source ↗
The question
If you could revise one chapter of your past, what would you change?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
Repeated verbatim in The Guardian's long-running Saturday Q&A; two publisher-hosted examples establish recurrence.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Others on this question
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Reggie Yates
British actor and media personality
How little confidence I had in my late teens and early 20s.
Sofie Gråbøl
Danish actress
I'd have a good, encouraging start in school – I think I'd be a different person, with fewer anxiety attacks.
Adam Lambert
American singer
I would try to work on being able to trust people more easily.
Robert Carlyle
Scottish actor
I'd have concentrated a bit more at school and maybe gone to university rather than drama school.
More from Siri Hustvedt
View profile →The Blazing World.
The man who asked me directions on the subway seven years ago: I am so sorry for sending you to Queens rather than to the Bronx.
I have a penchant for happiness. I have experienced euphoria before a migraine, which may not count, but I have also felt immense happiness leaning back in a chair in sunlight, puttering in my garden, reading, dancing, immediately after giving birth and when writing.
I was a floor model briefly at Bloomingdale’s in New York in 1979. I hated it. When no one was watching, I would lock myself in the toilet and read.
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