Winner of the Victorian Prize for Literature, Sarah Krasnostein’s The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman’s Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster is the fascinating biography of one of the people responsible for tidying up homes in the wake of natural–and unnatural–catastrophes and fatalities. Homicides and suicides, fires and floods, hoarders and addicts. When properties are … floods, hoarders and addicts. When properties are damaged or neglected, it falls to Sandra Pankhurst, founder of Specialized Trauma Cleaning (STC) Services Pty. Ltd. to sift through the ashes or sweep up the mess of a person’s life or death. Her clients include law enforcement, real estate agents, executors of deceased estates, and charitable organizations representing victimized, mentally ill, elderly, and physically disabled people. In houses and buildings that have fallen into disrepair, Sandra airs out residents’ smells, throws out their weird porn, their photos, their letters, the last traces of their DNA entombed in soaps and toothbrushes.
The remnants and mementoes of these people’s lives resonate with Sandra. Before she began professionally cleaning up their traumas, she experienced her own. First, as a little boy, raised in violence and excluded from the family home. Then as a husband and father, drag queen, gender reassignment patient, sex worker, small businesswoman, and trophy wife. In each role she played, all Sandra wanted to do was belong.
The Trauma Cleaner is the extraordinary true story of an extraordinary person dedicated to making order out of chaos with compassion, revealing the common ground Sandra Pankhurst–and everyone–shares with those struck by tragedy.
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While there are a few stories about trauma cleaning, most of the book tells of Sandra sexual transition. Her story is an interesting one but the most of the book was her biography, not about trauma cleaning.
I didn’t think the book matched the write-ups on it. Would not recommend.
This book was not what I expected it to be. According to the blurb this book is about the job of a trauma cleaner. Cleaning houses after the death of the owner by suicide or murder or helping a hoarder getting rid of years of garbage, dirt, rodents etc and even feces mixed in.
That was not the focus of the book. We did get a “little” look and information on that but the main story was the life of Sandra Pankhurst who was adopted into a terrible family as a little boy and later undergoes a sex change and lives her life as a woman.
It was interesting, sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes awful but overall the biography of a person that never gives up even though she sometimes takes a while to get on the right track. And that is the main thing I take away from this. Whatever life throws at you, deal with it and go on! I don’t agree with everything she decides to do but it is her life and her decisions.
Such an interesting and well told story!