The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman's Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster by Sarah Krasnostein

 

Summary (from the publisher): 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 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.

Review: In this work of non-fiction, author Sarah Krasnostein details the life of Sandra Pankhurst. Sandra was born a boy, had an abusive childhood, married young and had a failed marriage, became a drag queen, went through gender reassignment surgery, worked as a sex worker, became a small business owner with a trauma cleaning business, and has been a trophy wife. Hers is a remarkable life with many left turns and abrupt shifts. 

My issue with this book is not the book or its content itself but with the way it was marketed and presented. The book does indeed talk some about Sandra's work as a trauma cleaner, cleaning up homes after murders and suicides or clearing out space filled by hoarders. But that is truly a small percentage of the book. Rather than focusing on trauma cleaning, it is a full biography of Sandra's life, which has many, many chapters before she embarked on a career in trauma cleaning. The cover, title, and summary lead me to believe the core of the book would be trauma cleaning and it was most decidedly not. 

The subject matter of this book - Sandra Pankhurst - is a very complicated individual. She has done some brave and admirable things but also made many poor choices and treated others unfairly. I felt like the author did not stay impartial but instead attempted to justify all of Sandra's actions. I would have appreciated this book more if her story had been presented without any bias or attempts to try to explain away her sins. 

Stars: 3