Immunity to cruelty.
What is your greatest fear?
Question
Who most deserves an apology from you, and why?
Failure & regret
Question
What is the most important lesson life has taught you?
Time & hindsight
Question
What is the worst thing anyone has said to you?
Failure & regret
Question
What has been your biggest disappointment?
Failure & regret
Question
Which moment embarrassed you most?
Failure & regret
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
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.
That I can’t write.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 14 October 2023 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 256 →My lips are sealed.
Kathy Lette
Australian-British author
My own books being discounted. Oh, and sharks. The reason we Aussies swim so fast is because something much bigger is always trying to eat us.
Perfectionism that leads to procrastination.
More from Lemn Sissay
View profile →The Prince and Princess of Wales for not knowing when to leave their home.
Life is not worth living if there is no one you would die for.
When I was a child, a member of staff at Wood End Assessment Centre [a former children’s home in Wigan] bellowed: “He copies them poems off of Bob Marley records.”
I spent my life searching for family. I travelled around the world to look each one of them in the eye. Unfortunately, but understandably, for most of them, I am their biggest disappointment.
Also my most triumphant: 2017 at the Royal Court. Julie Hesmondhalgh reads my psychologist’s report over two hours. Every excruciating intimate word of it. Extreme verbatim theatre. One night only.
I made a suicide attempt at 12 or 13 years old.
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Also answered this
Seth Meyers, Marina Diamandis, Willem Dafoe, Joseph Fiennes, Marina Abramović, Jane Asher
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