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.
That I can’t write.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 14 October 2023 source ↗
My wife dying. I wouldn’t know how to go on.
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.”
Losing my mind.
That we will have waited too long to save the earth from environmental catastrophe.
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.”
Life is not worth living if there is no one you would die for.
Believing in, even admiring, people who refuse to believe in me, and not believing people who do.
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.
In a photo album of just one family.
I would build relationships. I would remember people’s significant moments. I would not fear closeness.
Rita Wilson, Jimmy Kimmel, Helen George, Timothy Hutton, Sarah Perry, Tony Christie
Search the directory for somebody in particular.