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

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Enter prostitution...her drag queen days.....life of drugs, and alcohol, as if horrific abuse wasn’t enough. Lastly, I do feel the need to point out that this book contains some seriously harrowing scenes; there is one rather lengthy and detailed rape in the middle of the book that might be triggering for some readers. A transgender former prostitute cleans up the fetid houses of the psychotic, the hopeless and the murdered. Sounds like some dubious TLC special, but it’s a fascinating bio of Sandra Pankhurst… Revelatory.’

We specialize in the unpleasant tasks that you need to have taken care of. Performing a public service as vital as it is gruesome, Sandra is one of the world’s unofficial experts on the living aspects of death. So much is clear from her brochure, which also showcases her intense practicality. Quoth the Brochure of Pankhurst: But there is something else of which I have become convinced over my years of speaking with her. Most people Sandra’s age can tell you in detail about how they came up, about the excitements and tragedies of being a young adult out in the world for the first time. This isn’t because their brains are any better than Sandra’s or because they did less drugs or drank less or had kinder childhoods. It is because they’ve told their stories more often. Because they were consistently surrounded by friends or parents or partners or children who were interested in seeing them as a whole person. Amazing…I couldn’t put this book down, and I can’t wait to recommend it to everyone I know.’ Readings Krasnostein is adept at laying out facts with no judgement or flourish, allowing their trauma to speak to us individually. She refuses to manipulate her readers, instead touching the facts lightly with a sense of perspective: “she will never fear what is ahead of her, only what is behind her”.Sandra Pankhurst has been a trauma cleaner for 20 years. Trauma in this context can mean a number of things. She cleans houses in which people have died, sometimes violently, sometimes through drugs, and very often alone. She cleans houses for people who have left them untended for so long they are barely habitable, such neglect often the result of mental illness. She cleans houses for people who are "textbook" hoarders, unable to throw away the piles of rubbish that threaten to bury them. First, this book is filled with empathy and respect. Hoarders, sex workers, LGBTQIA, those with behavioral health issues, and every other marginalized or otherwise disenfranchised person or group mentioned in this book is spoken of with tenderness and respect.

Krasnostein is an astute observer of human nature and her understated yet elegant prose is reminiscent of Helen Garner.’ much less about her business: The founder of Specialized Trauma Cleaning services in Melbourne, Australia. I didn’t even know that this was going to be the story that it was. I thought it was going to be the ins and out of cleaning crime scenes. It was that, too.....but really just a one part. It’s SANDRA WHO STAYS WITH ME.... Delivery with Standard Australia Post usually happens within 2-10 business days from time of dispatch. Please be aware that the delivery time frame may vary according to the area of delivery and due to various reasons, the delivery may take longer than the original estimated timeframe.The Trauma Cleaning business is the interesting part of the book. Sandra employs a lot of people to clean up after disasters, but mostly from hoarders and those that let their pets use their entire house as a bathroom. Sadly this most interesting part is very sketchy. This, as the blurb says, is a love letter to Sandra by the author.

Pankurst’s] story is probably one of the most touching, thoughtful and thought-provoking you will ever read…Sarah Krasnostein tells it with moving compassion, even love.’ New Zealand Herald STC Services have the compassion to deal with the residents, a very underestimated and valued requirement by its customers. Her advertising materials emphasize compassion, but that goes far deeper than the emotional-intelligence equivalent of her technical skill in neutralizing blood-borne pathogens. Sandra knows her clients as well as they know themselves; she airs out their smells, throws out their weird porn, their photos, their letters, the last traces of their DNA entombed in soaps and toothbrushes. She does not, however, erase these people. She couldn’t. She has experienced their same sorrows. A lot of people know some of the story, but they do not know all of the story.” And here it hits me what it is we are doing by telling this story. It is something at once utterly familiar and completely alien to Sandra: we are clearing away the clutter of her life out of basic respect for the inherent value of the person beneath.

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Sandra had an awful childhood. She was adopted through the Catholic church to a family in West Footscray, Melbourne. The father was an extremely violent alcoholic and both parents were physically and emotionally abusive. She was forced to live in a bungalow that her father built and she was excluded from the family home. They would deny her food and access to the bathroom. Krasnostein is prone to making such sweeping statements without any supporting detail or commentary from Sandra showing she believes this. Through countless encounters with the fetid, the neglected, and the downright tragic, Parkhurst has found meaning and peace, and [author] Krasnostein a singular subject whom she approaches with well-deserved awe." — Booklist (starred) It is the story of a survivor who not only survived but flourished. Amongst her struggles, Sandras heart shines through, her kindness and survival skills amazed me no end. Sarah Krasnostein is a multi-award winning writer and critic. She is the best-selling author of The Trauma Cleaner , The Believer and the Quarterly Essay, Not Waving, Drowning (2022). She has a doctorate in criminal law and is admitted to legal practice in New York and Victoria. Sarah has been awarded the Victorian Prize for Literature, the Australian Book Industry Award for General Non-Fiction, the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Non-Fiction, the Dobbie Literary Award, and the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards. She was a finalist for the Walkley Book Award, the National Biography Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature and the Wellcome Book Prize (UK). In 2022, she was awarded the Pascall Prize for Arts Criticism. She is a regular contributor to The Saturday Paper and The Monthly , and her work can be found in a variety of publications in Australia, America, and the UK.

Before she was a trauma cleaner, Sandra Pankhurst was many things: husband and father, drag queen, gender reassignment patient, sex worker, small businesswoman, trophy wife... but as a little boy, raised in violence and excluded from the family home, she just wanted to belong. Now she believes her clients deserve no less. A woman who sleeps among garbage she has not put out for 40 years. A man who bled quietly to death in his living room. A woman who lives with rats, random debris, and terrified delusion. The still life of a home vacated by accidental overdose. Mcleod’s major misstep is adding unnecessary reenactments’ … a still from Clean. Photograph: Narelle Portanier/MIFF 2022 Krasnostein’s playful yet heartfelt debut is one of the most arresting works of biography you will read in a long time.’Marriage and an attempt to live a “normal” life followed, but Sandra says she despised herself and feared becoming like her adoptive father. Despite being, by her own admission, psychologically ill-equipped for parenthood, she had two children, who remain absent from the film aside from a brief postscript. She was divorced in the late ‘70s on the grounds of homosexuality, but gay bars felt foreign to her until “a light went on in my head” after learning of transgender hormone treatments. The other thing I kept thinking while reading was “why didn’t James Frey do this when he wrote his “memoir”?????” Remember James Frey and his million little pieces that made Oprah all . . . .