As For Me and My Body

Keath Fraser, a friend of Sinclair Ross's for twenty-six years, offers an intimate portrait of the last years of Ross's often beleaguered life. Ross moved to Vancouver in 1982 and died fourteen years later at the age of 88. This elegant and earthy account of an artist in decline--crippled by Parkinson's Disease and a sense of failure, attracted to suicide and his own sexual revalations--leads the author to a new biographical reading of one of Canada's most acclaimed novels, As for Me and My House (1941). A homosexual, Sinclair Ross grew up behind his own false front on the prairies, developing after the war into a more cosmopolitan man than previously imagined. We catch glimpses of him living beside the Mediterranean in Greece and in Spain where his career as a novelist later revived and where Fraser first visited him in the 1970s.