Proust’s Character Questionnaire

Novel-writing is hard. It’s not that I didn’t anticipate this being a challenge, but it’s challenging in all sorts of ways I didn’t anticipate. I was braced for writing a book being a painful, tedious, brain-wringing and alienating excursion, as it was the first time and that was the part I energetically resisted returning to at every opportunity, but finally here I am and as it turns out there is so much work to do before facing that particular dragon. No, the bit that is so challenging is the making up of all of the things, every room, every character and their mother, father, and orthodontist, every plot point, all the decor, the weather - the fucking weather! - everything, everything, everything. For a controlling personality, who seeks ultimate freedom, it is a dream and a nightmare. I want to fix every detail to my specifications but what if one tiny decision I make is wrong, or would be better in one of the thousand other iterations it could take? For example, I went down quite a rabbit hole with a character last week whose job I had finally decided was a clown. I only know the very broad strokes of clownery - I took a workshop a couple years ago, spend a lot of time around circus people and I see 2-3 circus shows a year - so I had to do research, which entailed watching youtube videos, reading articles, venturing deep into the archives of several clowns’ instagrams. It took all week, and it felt like I was only scratching the surface of getting into a clown’s mindset. I had just about reached the decision to make a public appeal on instagram to shadow a professional clown for a couple weeks, when I went to Cirque du Soleil’s Allegria last night and was captivated by an incredible Cyr Wheel performer. How he danced and swirled through the air, magnetic and untouchable, shielded by a revolving steel circle. He was powerful, otherworldly and alone up there, and I felt with a strange mixture of intrigue and exhaustion as I began to think, actually, despite all the work so far down an entirely different rabbit hole, my character needed to be a Cyr Wheel performer!! I mean, UGH! Where does this torment end?! A whole week spent in imaginary clown world, and for what? For the pure childish pleasure of it? Apparently so. Or maybe he will be a clown. Or maybe not. Maybe I will spend a month interviewing Cyr Wheel performers and find they’re all narcissistic Peter-Pan-wannabe, arseholes and decide I want nothing to do with them. But, in order to find that out, I need to dive head first into this rabbit hole. And yes, I understand that art is never finished, just abandoned, etc etc, but there’s something about writing a novel and the scope of life it must cover, that renders me absolutely confounded by the fact so many get finished.

The conclusion I have come to is that writing a book was hard, yes, but writing a book as me, about me, focused only on the things that went on around the character of me, was so much easier than writing a book about characters I have to invent. In a way ‘I’ am a character I’ve been creating and honing for 32+ years so how on earth do I create characters with anywhere near as much depth and complexity as this womanly carcass I’ve been hauling around for all my earthly years, in -what? - 12-18 months? I mean, gawd, I honestly think novelists have a screw loose, and props to them for finding a healthy outlet for their madness, but meanwhile I am struggling to understand what type of creature I have to contort myself into in order to succeed at writing a novel. The other conclusion I have unfortunately come to is that, ok fine, in order to do this well and not lose my mind I have to fall back to the failsafe method of writing characters by simply letting all characters I write be me.

Which brings me to the problem I’m tackling at the moment. If all my characters are me at their essence - my secret cop out as a writer - I have to make a considerable effort to dress them up in other personalities (I have to because can you imagine trying to sell that book to a publisher!? Not enough Evanna Lynch from my whole memoir?? Here’s my new book I’ve written all about 35 different iterations of - hahaHA, youuuuu’ve guessed it - myself!’ Yeah, no). They all need accents, backstories, weaknesses, grievances. But as I began to work these things out I was constantly confronted by the limits of my own knowledge, and I couldn’t get away from the fact that all characters, no matter where they’re from or what year they were born in, they all sounded like me. It’s an adjustment to me because as an actor and memoirist, I’ve never had to stray too far from myself, because even when you play a character from a different time they are usually a similar age to you and generally look a lot like you, which are two major points of commonality. I remember my Meisner teacher telling me that every character you play is still you, but it’s you ‘As If’ such and such a thing had happened to you. It’s you ‘as if’ you were born in the 1840s. It’s you as if you’d endured terrible trauma as a child and developed a thick west Cork accent as a defence mechanism. You as if you’d murdered your lover, instantly regretted it and then sold your soul to an ancient crone in exchange for a spell that reincarnates him as a talking horse. The more ‘as if’s’ you pile on, the further you stray from the known territory that is yourself and venture into the imaginary realm of the character, but at its essence it’s still you. Really, this is what makes all art unique, if you are strong enough in yourself to hang on to your essence while accumulating all these imaginary circumstances. I’ve gotten a bit off track, haven’t I… The challenge with writing this book has been the sheer volume of ‘as if’s’ I have to explore, and how far from myself I have to go with them. In my previous work, I’ve never ‘as if’ed myself into a man for example, or a 65 year old or an incontinent cat, not in great detail, in any case. So this is a big leap and what I’m realising is, writing a novel is calling me to level up. Work doesn’t get easier the older you get, which is a discovery that I’m not thrilled about to be honest. Like weight lifting, you get stronger, sure, and used to it, but you have to keep subjecting the body to greater adversity and strain in order to grow. There is a large, lazy part of me that hates that.

Anyway, after several meltdowns resulting from these novel discoveries (pun intended), I decided I needed to conduct some in depth interviews with people other than myself. A while ago, my cousin Amy, who has written a fairytale and been through this type of mental torment before, passed on this questionnaire she used to create her characters. The idea is that instead of a glaring, blank word document in which to produce a neat and beautifully constructed biography your imagination is prodded into creation by specific questions about the character. Apparently it’s quite a common technique for writers, and there are all sorts of character questionnaires flying around the internet. The one that Amy passed on to me is the Marcel Proust questionnaire that apparently was a set of questions devised by his childhood friend Antoinette, in order for them to get to know each other better, but that now lots of creatives use for professional work. So about a fortnight ago I appealed to some friends to exchange questionnaires with me, in an effort to understand the inner lives of others in greater depth and to stimulate my imagination to think like a boy, a cat, an acrobat, etc. It has been such a fun exercise! Very telling, even when people opt not to go into detail on certain questions. I’m not yet sure if it will serve my writing process in a substantial way, but is has been fun, and it’s been an unusual way to connect with some friends. So without further ado I thought I’d share the Proust questionnaire and my answers to them for posterity’s sake. I have only slightly amended them from the answers I sent privately to my friends because, you know, it’s just not an opportune time for me to be sued. On a not unrelated note, should I just go ahead and rename the ‘Blog’ tab on this website, ‘navel-gazing’? Happy Thursday, peeps. xxx

Here is Proust’s Questionnaire:

1.     What is your idea of perfect happiness?

A sunny day, purring cats, an oat latte, chocolate, a stack of books, and a leisurely day at home to luxuriate in these delights :)

2.     What is your greatest fear?

We ought not fixate on our fears, so I am loathe to write them down here. Personally, I feel my thoughts are best spent dwelling on my greatest joys instead.

3.     What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

I am quite self-centred. I really find it hard to muster interest in anything I’m not interested in. If I try to read a book on a subject I don’t care for, I may as well be studying a blank page. However it’s not honest to say I ‘deplore’ this trait, because I enjoy my own company very much, but I feel I would be a more worldly, well-rounded person if I could be interested in things that have nothing to do with myself.

‘Deplore’, though? Probably the thing I deplore in myself is that I have an addiction to negativity. I really hate and look down on things like celebrity gossip or bitchy forums on the internet and yet sometimes I find myself consumed by curiosity to check those toxic spaces and can spend my bedtime reading hour submerged in character assassinations of people who I’m sure are perfectly nice and doing their best. It is addicting and fascinating to me to read about people’s character flaws, but I wish the impulse to pursue negativity wasn’t there. When I can get my instagram explore page - that dreaded mirror of the shadow self - to only show pictures of persian cats and cheerful reels about how to propagate a monstera, that’s when I’ll know I’ve vanquished my demons.

4.     What is the trait you most deplore in others?

Pandering/ Insincerity.

5.     Which living person do you most admire?

My mentor/ fairygodmother, Catherine Maguire. J.K.Rowling, Amelie Nothomb and Eckhart Tolle.

6.     What is your greatest extravagance?

Ombar Chocolate. £3.99 a bar, worth every penny.

7.     What is your current state of mind?

Focused, assured, but a bit gloomy. I’m not finding much joy in my work at the moment.

8.     What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

Modesty. I find it a bit weak to be honest. I prefer people to be assertive about their purpose and their gifts.

9.     On what occasion do you lie?

When I don’t want to go out to a big social event.

10.  What do you most dislike about your appearance?

Probably my cheeks. High cheekbones would be nice.

11.  Which living person do you most despise?

For legal reasons I won’t be answering this one. And I despise this person so much that it would be a terrible act of self-betrayal to even suggest another answer.

12.  What is the quality you most like in a man?

Gentle-hearted, an adventurous spirit and a literary mind.

13.  What is the quality you most like in a woman?

Strength and appetite

14.  Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

I say ‘I think’ far too much. ‘I think that I thought that you would think I was thinking this’.

15.  What or who is the greatest love of your life?

My mum and dad.

Den! <3

When I think about true love, I also often think about my friend Simon who passed away in 2017. We had an amazing emotional and artistic bond, which I thought was relatively common among artists, but as time passes I think it was more rare than I realised. I know it is only too tempting to romanticise the dead, and still I feel this friendship was much deeper than that.

16.  When and where were you happiest?

17, living in Maida Vale, London, with my beautiful, cool older cousin Amy, and going to work at Leavesden every day, then doing 3 hours of dance classes each evening. I was finally overcoming my adolescent insecurities and felt invincible.

17.  Which talent would you most like to have?

A gymnast. Gymnasts can do anything with their body which sounds like total freedom. Freedom is all I aspire to.

18.  If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

I wish I were friendlier. I think I am lacking some basic social skills that include initiating conversation with strangers. For some reason I find myself paralysed when it comes to having to say ‘hello’ first. I like a big, loud personality for this reason, they immediately put me at ease. But I think I falsely give the impression to people that I’m shy purely because I don’t know how to do the foundational social work of getting to know someone. And once I’ve established myself as the shy, quiet, odd one in the corner it is really hard to break out of that persona. And it’s unfortunate because I’m dying to connect with people and I have so much to say.

That said, I don’t wish I had more friends, I am fully at capacity in that respect. If one more person sends me a voice note today, I shall scream.

19.  What do you consider your greatest achievement?

Writing my book. And keeping Puff alive and well for 10+ years, my longest committed relationship! I’m so proud of our relationship.

20.  If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?

A gymnast in Cirque Du Soleil. Failing that, a squirrel. They are the gymnasts of the animal kingdom and can elude most predators.

21.  Where would you most like to live?

I love living in London. I would love a big old house in Hampstead Heath or Highgate.

22.  What is your most treasured possession?

My box of handwritten letters.

23.  What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

Working at a slaughterhouse. I don’t mean morally, I know most slaughterhouse workers don’t have a choice and endure terrible trauma. I mean physically I think slaughterhouses are hell on earth.

24.  What is your favorite occupation?

Something whimsical like a chocolatier or a dressmaker. I like the craftmanship, the routine, how it is a combination of making art and intuiting what the customer wants and needs. It’s a very honest and artistic way of life.

The occupation I most admire however is writer, but I don’t find it whimsical or enviable.

25.  What is your most marked characteristic?

My independence and curiosity.

26.  What do you most value in your friends?

Friends who are purposeful, inspirational, lit from within. I don’t mind if I don’t hear from friends for months, if you’re doing what you love and let me do my thing, I applaud that. Friends who are curious and always have a pursuit they are pursuing passionately. I find it hard to relate to people who are frequently bored or aimless.

27.  Who are your favorite writers?

Vladimir Nabokov, Amélie Nothomb, Joe Dunthorne, J.K.Rowling. Lately I discovered Bohumil Hrabal whose memoir about his mental health and his cats was absolutely riveting, and Patricia Lockwood whose prose I find very alive and funny.

28.  Who is your hero of fiction?

Charlotte from Charlotte’s Web

29.  Which historical figure do you most identify with?

Lucia Joyce

30.  Who are your heroes in real life?

Undercover animal activists.

31.  What are your favorite names?

Esme, Lucia, Siobhan, Fred, Leonardo. But I am dying to adopt a grumpy, old, distinguished looking cat and call him Humbert.

32.  What is it that you most dislike?

Emails and texts. I so dislike that I spend more time answering emails and texts than I do acting, writing, dancing etc. Technically speaking, if I go by the hours I spend at each discipline, I am a professional E-mailer. This feels all wrong as I don’t even like technology that much. I would love to be able to run my career and social life without constant texting and emailing.

I also sincerely dislike people-pleasing in myself and others. More and more, I have such admiration for people who speak their truth even when it may offend, whose words have integrity and substance, and who live exactly as they want to. The amount of people who are in the habit of overexerting themselves, giving their time, energy and money to others against their will and against their better judgement is unnerving, and I believe the source of great unhappiness and discord. 

33.  What is your greatest regret?

I wish I had gone to drama school to study acting. I regret my youthful impetuosity that propelled me, with little thought, towards LA when I would have benefited more from being in formal education. LA had me too preoccupied with people’s perception of me and how to manipulate that, when I should have been figuring out my own artistic identity. What’s more I love learning and I love teachers. As someone fairly intellectual, it’s doesn’t feel great to not be qualified in anything.

34.  How would you like to die?

I’d like it to be a really bright, warm, sunny day and to go outside, lay down and enjoy the sunshine for the last time and hopefully slip away sometime after. I like the idea of surrendering my body back to the earth.

35.  What is your motto?

Anything done in love is done well.