Proust Questionnaire
- What is your idea of perfect happiness?
- It’s a tossup: being outside with my family on a warm sunny day, or being completely alone in our Cape house, writing, in a blizzard.
- What is your current state of mind?
- Disbelieving. Am I really an author?
- What is your greatest fear?
- I don’t like to think about it.
- What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
- The inability to get up early.
- What is the trait you most deplore in others?
- Taking things too seriously (politics, religion, themselves).
- What is your greatest extravagance?
- Buying nice things for our house.
- What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
- The ability to get up early.
- What is it that you most dislike?
- People spreading hate in the name of God.
- On what occasion do you lie?
- When I’m too wimpy to risk offending someone.
- What do you dislike most about your appearance?
- All the things that jiggle that aren’t supposed to.
- What are the qualities you most like in a man?
- Strength, intelligence, sense of humor, irreverence.
- What are the qualities you most like in a woman?
- Ditto.
- Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
- “Well, actually…”
- What or who is the greatest love of your life?
- My family.
- When and where were you happiest?
- Another tossup: wedding day; births of our three children; and the day the man who would become my agent said, “I would give my eyeteeth to represent this book.”
- Which talent would you most like to have?
- To be effortlessly musical.
- What do you consider your greatest achievement?
- It’s yet to happen.
- If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
- I wouldn’t procrastinate.
- If you were to die and come back as a person or thing, what do you think it would be?
- A lead singer in a really great band.
- What is your most treasured possession?
- I love beautiful things but I like to think I’m not unduly attached to anything in particular.
- What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
- Incurable depression.
- What is your most marked characteristic?
- My children say I laugh too loudly.
- What do you most value in your friends?
- Loyalty.
- Who are your favorite writers?
- Fitzgerald, Salinger, Tolstoy, Woolf, William Maxwell, Walker Percy, T.S. Eliot, William Styron, Susan Minot, among many, many more.
- Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
- I suppose he’s not the hero but I am very fond of Nick Carraway. Also Jack Burden (ditto–the observer-hero in All the King’s Men) and Zooey Glass. And Will Barrett, in Walker Percy’s The Last Gentleman. Also a non-hero hero. I guess there’s a pattern here.
- Who is your favorite heroine?
- Today I’ll say Mrs. Ramsay in To the Lighthouse.
- Who are your heroes in real life?
- I am always left in awe when I watch the Olympics. I am the least athletic person on the planet but I find that singleminded pursuit of fleeting perfection thrilling.
- What is your motto?
- Do not hurry, do not rest.
- What is your greatest regret?
- I won’t say, because I’ve still got time to fix it.
- How would you like to die?
- When I’m old and have written a dozen or so very good books, and, as one of Salinger’s lesser heroines said, with all my F-A-C-U-L-T-I-E-S intact.
