The loss of a child.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, March 2018 source ↗
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.
Others on this question
View all 256 →
Patti Smith
Musician, poet and photographer
Collapse of the imagination.
Losing my mind.
I never want to go back; I fought so much through my life, that I have to keep going forward.
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.”
More from Sally Mann
View profile →On the island of Bequia—one summer, out of the blue, a benefactor (thank you, Charlene) flew our entire family there and put us up in a cliffside house that was a weird mixture of Gaudí and Fred Flintstone and where we went to sleep at eight and got up at five. In between we read, swam, hiked, and unknowingly enjoyed the last moment before the irrevocable shear of adolescence set in.
Quickly, without warning, maybe even in my sleep, and while we're putting in requests: before I lose my mind and my ability to gallop across the countryside on horseback.
Reading. And, in particular, reading on the deck of the cabin while my children play in the river below.
Knowing when to show up and when to go home.
More on identity & self
- Which trait in yourself do you like least? 239 answers
- As a child, what career or life did you imagine for yourself? 197 answers
- What most recently moved you to tears? 192 answers
- What does happiness look like for you when life is going well? 158 answers
- How would you sum yourself up in three words? 114 answers
- What fills you with the most pride? 103 answers
Also answered this
Judy Blume, Carrie Fisher, Gregory Porter, Jack Whitehall, Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, Chaka Khan
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All identity & self questions
- The The Proust Questionnaire questionnaire — 5 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject