Maggie O'Farrell
Irish-British novelist
Interrupting or talking over people. As a stammerer, I am particularly alert to this.
What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Question
What is your idea of perfect happiness?
Identity & self
Question
What is your greatest fear?
Identity & self
Question
Which trait do you most dislike in yourself?
Identity & self
Question
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Values & belief
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
A verbatim standing question in The Guardian's rotating Q&A questionnaire, documented across respondents and years.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Casual cruelty; the wearing of essential oils.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, September 2014 source ↗
Others on this question
View all 197 →Coldness, selfishness.
People who do not love. If you are not loving, you are not living. Why wouldn’t you love? What’s the problem?
Cruelty…no, maybe dishonesty or disingenuousness. All are equally deplorable.
More from Lena Dunham
View profile →Unmade bed surrounded by books, writing utensils, and the dog; a plate of demolished toast with butter on my chest; loved ones puttering not too close but not too far.
To lose the ability to do my work.
An “elastic” sense of time (fancy way of saying I am late a lot).
My uncle, Edward Wood Dunham. He has Parkinson’s disease and faces every day with bravery, humor, and a gin-and-tonic.
More on values & belief
- Which living person do you most admire, and why? 406 answers
- What is something everyone in your world agrees about that you think is wrong? 79 answers
- What are you unwilling to optimise? 30 answers
- What have you come to understand about what it means to be human? 14 answers
- What is the most overrated virtue? 10 answers
- What do you need to believe in order to get through the day? 9 answers
Also answered this
Alison Steadman, Adam Kay, Terry Gross, Brandi Carlile, Joyce Carol Oates, Rafael Nadal
Search the directory for somebody in particular.
Explore further
- All values & belief questions
- The The Q&A questionnaire — 25 questions from the same format
- Explore the archive — by field, age, era, and subject