As for Me and My Body: A Memoir of Sinclair Ross

Paul Hjartarson is an associate professor of English at the University
of Alberta.

This book is less a memoir of Sinclair Ross than it is a reductive
reading of the gifted but reticent writer’s best-known work, As for Me
and My House. Adopting the role of tabloid journalist, Fraser offers
this thesis early on: “I sometimes think [Ross’s] first and most
important novel, As for Me and My House (1941), might be called As for
Me and My Body, because this is what I believe it really concerns—at
an obsessive, unadmitted level—a revelation of its author’s deepest
desires and fears, and [this] is partly what prompts my selective
memoir, the false front of this novel and his other fiction about which
much literary criticism has ignored the body in question.” Arguing
that Ross’s “unadmitted” sexuality is the key to his fiction,
Fraser proceeds to deconstruct all those “false fronts.”

Fraser and Ross had a friendship that spanned more than two decades. As
the following excerpt suggests, Fraser appears to have used the
friendship to get the goods on Ross. “One day ten years before his
death, Ross asked me if I thought As for Me and My House was a
homosexual novel. Vague and cautious, hoping not to scare off any
disclosure he wished to make about his work, I waited.” Ross deserved
better.