I don’t know how I went through so much of my life not knowing about the Proust Questionnaire. It’s one of those things that shows up everywhere once you know about it. People during writer Marcel Proust’s time filled out personality questionnaires as an amusement (then called, charmingly, “confession albums”). This was before Facebook and its which-character-in-Game of Thrones-are-you quizzes, but the same idea.
The questions are things like “who would you want to be if you weren’t you,” and one has come to be called the Proust Questionnaire. The writer took it twice, once at age fourteen and once at twenty.
The unofficial social secretary of Balbec’s two sets of answers are revealingly different. His favorite virtue in himself, at fourteen, was the need to be “loved” as well as “caressed and spoiled.” This ranks as a serious surprise from a writer who’d spend much of his later life alone in a cork-lined room. At twenty Proust’s answer to the question was “the universal virtues.” Maybe then he saw cork in his future.
The younger Proust said that he’d want to be, if not himself, the person his friends wanted him to be. The older Proust wrote that he would not answer the question of who he wished to be, then said he’d like to be Pliny the Younger.
Odd Proustiana aside, the list has thirty-five questions and has been used by Vanity Fair to interview writers like Joan Didion and Norman Mailer. Sophia Loren answered it recently--turns out she admires Kamala Harris and her favorite thing to do is eat, especially pasta and whipped cream.
The questionnaire gets cited frequently as a device in writing fiction: have your characters take the Proust Questionnaire and you can deepen your sense of who they are. But I suggest using the Proust Questionnaire for nonfiction and doing it as Proust did: over time.
You may not have six years to wait and see how you’ve changed (though that’s not a bad idea). But we change each day and each hour and probably, minute. We have selves under this and that political leader; pre- and post-lockdown selves; selves during crises. People arrive in our lives, they depart, we gather new knowledge about our fears and desires and our bodies. Maybe, as it did with Proust, one day a cookie dipped in lime tea will change everything.
This doesn’t suggest all nonfiction will focus on the author. It will not. But something that doesn’t change the observer is unlikely to move the reader or auditor, unless they are predisposed to be so moved. It’s an essential question: how have things changed, and how have they changed you.
I once went through a life-or-death event with my child. After that, my answer to the “what would be my greatest happiness” question would simply be not being there, in that time. I’m a different person, with a greater sense of the beauty of the normal day. That fact carries a story, one that questions the nature of happiness itself. And it is, to be honest, a story I hadn’t thought about until just now.
Proust himself seemed to intuit that the questionnaire told a fairly complex tale, one greater than a momentary scribble. Why answer a question by first saying you won’t answer it? Maybe it means some questions shouldn’t have answers. Yet we can’t resist answering them anyway.
Try taking this questionnaire every week or month—take it at least four times. See what your answers tell you and ask yourself whether there’s a story in those changes. Freewrite (aka, scribble!) on why and how the changes you see have occurred. Those short answers will contain remarkably complex stories. Like my happiness answer, your answers will contain worlds.
Here’s the full questionnaire—or more delightfully, confession album.
The situation in Ukraine is unspeakable. Some places that can help include World Central Kitchen, founded by chef Jose Andres—it’s on the ground providing food for refugees and others impacted by the war. Doctors Without Borders is providing medical care. Razom for Ukraine, an organization that has worked to build democracy in Ukraine, is now buying medical supplies. If there are other organizations you can vouch for, send me an email and I’ll add them.