What did you want to be when you were growing up?

Originally asked

The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A

This is a standing question in The Guardian's decades-long The Q&A and also recurs independently in career and life interviews.

You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.

Recorded Kurt Vonnegut said elsewhere, not written here
I was going to be a journalist. But after the war I studied anthropology, just in order to become educated. I thought it was worth knowing the science of man. I still intended to become a journalist, but there were no jobs, because the reporters who had gone to war were coming back and were entitled to their jobs, and the women who had replaced them were damned if they’d leave, and they shouldn’t have left.

Frank Houston, Salon, 8 October 1999 source ↗

Others on this question

View all 227 →
Joss Stone English singer, songwriter, and actress
A veterinarian, but I decided against it because it required too many years of schooling; I wasn’t great at school.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 24 April 2021 source ↗
Edward Enninful Ghanaian-born English editor and stylist
In African families, you can be one of three things: a doctor, a lawyer or a failure. I wanted to be an Egyptologist, but things worked out in the end.
Recorded The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 24 December 2022 source ↗

More from Kurt Vonnegut

View profile →
Question How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a favourite failure? Failure & regret
I would try to write my war story, whether it was interesting or not, and try to make something out of it. I describe that process a little in the beginning of Slaughterhouse Five; I saw it as starring John Wayne and Frank Sinatra. Finally, a girl called Mary O’Hare, the wife of a friend of mine who’d been there with me, said, “You were just children then. It’s not fair to pretend that you were men like Wayne and Sinatra, and it’s not fair to future generations, because you’re going to make war look good.” That was a very important clue to me.
Recorded George Plimpton, David Hayman, David Michaelis and Richard Rhodes, The Paris Review, issue 69, Spring 1977, 1 January 1977 source ↗

More on identity & self

Also answered this

Margaret Atwood, J.K. Rowling, David Hare, Kate Mosse, Shirley MacLaine, Jack Whitehall

Search the directory for somebody in particular.

Explore further

Report this answer