Paris writer Anne Marsella, author of The Baby of Belleville, Remedy, Patsy Boone and The Lost and Found and Other Stories, had the excellent idea of asking Paris-based writers to answer the Proust Questionnaires.
Succinct, personal and slightly whimsical, these interviews offer a glimpse into the personality and work of writers who have made Paris their home.
What is the Proust Questionnaire ? Anne Marsella explains:
This personality questionnaire originating in an English-language confession album caught Marcel Proust’s fancy in his teens. He enthusiastically answered the questionnaire several times at different periods of his life and was responsible for popularizing the format to which his name has since been wedded. He believed the interview revealed something of an individual’s true nature and when answering it displayed just how deep his own literary layers lay:
What do you appreciate most in your friends?
Proust: To have tenderness for me, if their personage is exquisite enough to render quite high the price of their tenderness.”
He could also be uncharacteristically succinct:
What are your favorite qualities in a man?
Proust: Feminine charms.
What are your favorite qualities in a woman?
Proust: Manly virtues, and frankness in friendship.
Clearly Proust was having good fun with the questionnaire. Because this exercise in personality probing seeks above all to entertain -- both interviewee and reader -- it remains popular today. Vanity Fair’s back page has made prolific use of it, interviewing celebrities from all walks of the arts.
In this spirit, I’ve asked several fellow writers based in Paris to answer it for Paris Writers News.
Watch for upcoming Proust Questionnaires with Heather Hartley, Paul Schmidtberger, Helen Schulman, Janet Skeslien Charles and more!!!
Anne Marsella has been living in Paris for some twenty years. She is the author of four books: The Baby of Belleville, Remedy, Patsy Boone and The Lost and Found and Other Stories. Her work has appeared in numerous publications and anthologies both in the US and in France. She is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination, the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award (New York University Press) and several residency fellowships. Her novel, Patsy Boone, was written directly in French and published by Editions de la Différence. Having taught literature and creative writing at the American University of Paris and associate directed New York University’s Writers in Paris program, she currently directs the Wells College Arts in Paris program.
