Sarah KrasnosteinCritiques

If you look up "Resilience" in the dictionary you should find a picture of Sandra Pankhurst. I imagine her looking back at me from the page, sybillic, blue-eyed and golden-haired, immaculately dressed and made up, perhaps a smile playing around the corners of her mouth. I try, again and again, to reconcile all the different versions of herself Sandra has been, or made herself into, but the incongruities keep coming up against one another. Is this her gift, that she so resolutely IS, in spite of everything that befell her?

Sandra Pankhurst was born, designated 'male', in the early fifties. She survived stomach-churning abuse and neglect at the hands of her adoptive parents, married and had children, performed in drag shows, had gender reassignment surgery, was a sex worker, remarried, ran businesses and created Specialised Trauma Cleaning (STC) Services Pty Ltd. STC is who you call when you need to clean up after hoarders, squalid or trashed properties, meth labs, homicides, suicides and "other death scenes." With seemingly boundless compassion and empathy coupled with a Puritan work-ethic, Mrs Pankhurst and her team bring hygiene, order and sweetness to the most fetid places hidden in ordinary suburbs.

Sarah Krasnostein has crafted a biography that is almost a love-letter, its language skillfully making an economical statement here, a sharp, shocking stab of pain there, or rising gracefully to some sunlit imagery or compassionate admiration of her subject, and her wounded clientele. It is also a shout into the darkness inhabited by cruel bigotry, malicious neglect and faceless beaurocracy, proclaiming, "Sandra, this is your story. You exist in the Order of Things and the Family of People. You belong, you belong, you belong."

The Trauma Cleaner deservedly won the 2018 Victorian Premier’s literary awards including the $100,000 Victorian prize for literature and the $25,000 category prize for nonfiction. I hope many people read Sandra Pankhurst's story, and I hope that Sandra can in some way use this book to create that deep feeling of belonging that enables us to truly connect with one another. I also hope to read more from Sarah Krasnostein in the future.

This story found within the pages of THE TRAUMA CLEANER One Woman’s Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster was unexpected. I find myself a bit mislead because I wanted this to be about a woman who cleaned up messes and made it easier to cope and move on from the traumatic event of Death what I got was a book about a woman who transitions from being a man to a woman. When I start off my review and say I feel mislead I so not wish anyone to think I am disappointed this is still a three-star read. I find Sandra’s candor refreshing. While helping people deal with there lives and delimas we get a glimpse of who Sandra was and who she wanted to be. If you take anything away from this book I hope that acceptance and self-awareness is what you get. The strength that is depicted in these pages is not something to take lightly. I am so glad to live in a day and age where I can say that people need to do what makes them feel like the best versions of themselves and not give into what society wants them to be. Sarah Krasnostein is very courageous in telling Sandra’s story just as Sandra is amazing for opening up and being herself regardless of the rough road. Rhank you netgalley and all parties for my arc.

Wow! This was a fabulous book. Raw, revealing, touching, sad and kind. I wonder why I had waited so long to read this.

Wow! This was an amazing read... not what I expected. Sandra’s life is undeniably sad. The cleaning is almost secondary (although I ‘enjoyed’ grimacing through the descriptions of them too) but are woven into Sandra’s story, shedding light onto her character and how she is able to deal with her clients with absolute patience, firmness, care, and with no judgement.

Age Spectrum 3 June 23

This is a beautiful biography

The premise and the story are phenomenal. The addition of the vignettes about trauma cleaning adds a rich dimension to the entire story. I would have given this book a 4, but unfortunately the author tries a bit too hard and in trying to sound profound, falls flat.

Sandra Pankhurst runs a trauma cleaning business. She excels in cleaning up horrific messes left by crime scenes, suicides, hoarders, the disabled and others who simply cannot cope with the routines of an orderly life.

While this work is interesting, Krasnostein profiles Sandra much more than her business, and reveals a life story of an incredibly damaged and neglected child who has found a way to cope with the horrific messes life has thrown at her, long before she started doing it for others. One could list a litany of the challenges that Sandra has had to deal with in her life but, really, it is better for people to read this hair-raising story for themselves and not have it spoiled for them. I found it moving and bittersweet. My only demurral was a minor one, in that I felt Krasnostein got a bit too close to her subject and got a bit gushy on occasions, but this is still a terrific book.

This was an interesting story. Sandra has lead a varied life as she figured out who she was. The story of the rape was horrible and I am sorry that Sandra had to go through that. I like how many different lives Sandra lived before she founded her company and I like that she is so caring and understanding with her clients.

This was absolutely amazing.

Based on an advanced copy from NetGalley.

You know what I love? I love when a book promises something, but then delivers in spades.

This is one of those books. I came in expecting a bit of backstory, and a lot about trauma cleaning. Instead, the backstory was absolutely riveting, and made up the bulk of the narrative.

What an amazing, awful, enlightening story.

I'm richer for having read this.

I absolutely loved this book.This gripping account is told with compassion and respect for a woman who has overcome adversity and turns this personal trauma into a way of connecting with others in their time of need. Despite the subject matter, I felt empathy and admiration for the manner in which Sandra Pankhurst overcomes so many obstacles in life to find acceptance and her place in the community.½

A fascinating read about people's beliefs regarding God, creation, evolution, death, UFOs and the paranormal. Kranostein has once again mastered the art of creative non-fiction writing in the well researched, sincere and insightful offering. Well worth a look.½

Fascinating, heartbreaking, often hilarious true story of a woman's life, her journey, missteps and glorious advancement from early boyhood through to her 7th decade.

This was a Kris Kringle gift for Christmas 2020 from a lovely Bookclub friend. Inside was a card with these words:

"Merry Christmas to You!
I chose this novel as a gift because I found it so interesting and an eye opener on so many fronts.
It shines a light in a sensitive, respectful and compassionate way on:
-How transgender women [in Australia]were treated in the 70's and 80's;
-Hoarding;
-A role in society that is rarely heard about - cleaning and restoring homes after murders, deaths, hoarding or individuals with mental health issues.
Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!
L xxx"

Well I abandoned all other books and stared reading it that week. I was intrigued by Sandra's story, at times felt terribly sick and shocked at what I was reading, .... then again, fascinated ... but did not expect the mixture of emotions it brought out in me. The book is well written, with descriptive passages, at times the writing is almost poetic. I found Sandra's life so interesting, and am happy that she shines despite all that she's been through. What a beautiful soul she is.This is a book that everyone should read.

A pretty interesting read. Firstly because of the life of the trauma cleaner herself, a trans woman who made some tough choices in her life when being trans was culturally very difficult. And secondly, and for me, the more interesting aspect of this book, the job of a trauma cleaner itself. Excavating the homes of chronic hoarders whilst they look on and reclaiming spaces after murder or suicide has occurred. I read this as an audiobook, and it works well in this format.

I think it was because of the word ‘Trauma’, but I thought this book would be American. Trauma seems to be the call of the American nothing as dramatic seems to happen elsewhere, and yet it does, and as the places are named - streets in Footscray, suburbs in Melbourne, I suddenly realised trauma happens everywhere. Maybe we just call it something else.
Sandra is revealed as hard and impenetrable, but then you realise that it’s a defensive shell that she wears because every step of her life has been hard, and so many people in her life have rejected her. Who wouldn’t put on armour plate when everyone is trying to stab you?
The book was gripping. Devastating. Painful. Raw. I wept, I laughed, I sympathised and empathised and Underwood and failed to understand in equal measure.

Fascinating, and sometimes unnerving. I picked this up because I was curious about the work, but the biographical details sucked me in more than I expected (which was good because there's definitely more detail about Sandra than the logistics of the cleaning).

Content warning: There is a violent rape described in detail, as well as severe child abuse, and other assaults.

This is one of the stranger books I have read. It's about a women that provides a service for cleaning up houses for hoarders or crime scenes, and I expected it to be a bit gruesome but I did not expect the main character to be transgender. There are two parallel stories here, one of the woman growing up as an unwanted adopted child in her incredibly abusive family, and the other of her cleaning business and terminal illness. She is dying from COPD and liver disease, and I wonder if her illness was caused by her line of work. I am sure she is exposed to all kinds of mold and chemicals. It was disturbing and sad story.

I borrowed this from the library without paying too close attention to the blurb, thinking that this would be a slightly trashy, true-crimey look at what it's like to be a "trauma cleaner": to run a specialised cleaning service dealing with extreme cases such as hoarding, or the aftermaths of untimely or overlooked deaths. Instead, Sarah Krasnostein has produced a surprisingly compassionate, thoughtful memoir which deals with both the business and the life of its owner, Sandra. And what a life that owner has had: adopted into a conservative, abusive family in 1960s Australia, Sandra was raised male, married and had kids, but then realised her need to transition and abandoned her family. One of the first trans people to medically transition in Australia, Sandra spent the '80s as a drag queen, drug user, and sex worker; reinvented herself in the '90s as a respectable suburban housewife and small business owner who runs for the town council; and now, widowed and battling COPD, runs a trauma cleaning service.

Sandra is clearly a complex person, with a lot of superficial charm but an aversion to introspection or examining her past in great detail. This means that Krasnostein is as much thinking through how to write a memoir someone who can't or won't examine her own history as she is anything else. Sometimes Krasnostein's musings get a little florid, and I wish she had found a clearer way to demarcate when she's basing her account of Sandra's life on specific sources and when she's imagining what "must have" happened/been felt. Still, an engrossing look at a singular and contradictory woman.

(Note: the book contains a detailed description of a sexual assault.)

Peter was adopted by his parents after Bill and Ailsa lost a child. When she conceived again and had two more boys, they moved Peter from the family home to a shed in the garden. He was rarely fed and expected to be a slave to the family and beaten by his father regularly for no reason at all. The torment and abuse continue until he is seventeen and then he is thrown out. Two years later he has met and is married to Linda and shortly after they have two boys themselves.

Peter had always felt different from other boys, and being out of the pressure zone that was his previous home meant he managed to stop surviving and begin living. He began frequenting gay bars and wearing makeup. It had never even crossed his mind that he might be trans, but when he heard that you could take drugs to enable the transfer to a female, he began as soon as he could. One thing led to another, he split from Linda and ended up as a prostitute. As soon as he was able to he had the operation and became fully female, something that she thought she would never be able to do.

After a few years working nights in the oldest profession, Sandra was brutally raped with another prostitute and made the decision to get out of the trade before it killed her. She ended up in a funeral directors, then a hardware store with her new husband and then went onto a cleaning company before starting her own business. The story of Sandra’s life is told hand in hand with the stories of the homes and people that she helps out every week cleaning up after trauma victims and helping those whose homes and lives have become unmanageable. After a lifetime of being on the edge of society, she is now helping those who have not been able to help themselves.

It really is not a book to read when you’re eating your lunch as the descriptions that Krasnostein has of the home being cleaned after deaths and suicides can be pretty grim. But this is true life and these things do not fix themselves, but require people with courage and industrial cleaning chemicals to fix. Pankhurst is one remarkable lady, even after a horrendous childhood and working in the prostitution trade she has an amazing amount of empathy for all of her clients when she is asked to clean and clear homes, treating them with a firm attitude whilst respecting their dignity. This is not going to be for everyone, but if you want to have a no holds barred look at a part of society that almost everyone will be unaware of then this is a one to read.

I got this book because of the word of mouth on LT and Litsey about how good it was. Going in I was expecting the main focus to be the cleaning jobs Sandra Pankhurst had worked on, but her lifestory as a trans woman in Australia was unexpectedly compelling.

I also didn't realise the book was somebody writing about her rather than her own memoirs. And TBH I found the way the author kept injecting herself and her opinions into the narrative rather irritating. Also the book was definitely overwritten in places in a search for significance and literary style which it didn't need as Ms Pankhurst's life and work are more than capable of standing on their own merits.½

I chose to listen to this book on audio without knowing anything about it - too afraid of spoilers. Sandra Pankhurst is an amazing person, truly inspiring!

Sarah Krasnostein, law lecturer and researcher with a PhD in Criminal Law, first met Sandra Pankhurst at a conference for forensic support services, where Sandra sat in the lobby, advertising her Victorian based company, Specialised Trauma Cleaning (STC).

““This is what it says on the back of Sandra Pankhurst’s business card:
‘Excellence is no Accident’
Hoarding and Pet Hoarding Clean Up * Squalor/Trashed
Properties * Preparing the Home for Home Help Agencies
to Attend * Odour Control * Homicide, Suicide and
Death Scenes * Deceased Estates * Mould, Flood and Fire
Remediation * Methamphetamine Lab Clean Up
* Industrial Accidents * Cell Cleaning”

Intrigued by Sandra’s profession, Sarah arranges an interview, but soon finds that Sandra herself, is equally as fascinating. The Trauma Cleaner is less a story about the chaos faced at the scenes STC attends, and more about the trauma that Sandra has endured, and overcome, during her life.

“Many facts of Sandra’s past are either entirely forgotten, endlessly interchangeable, neurotically ordered, conflicting or loosely tethered to reality. She is open about the fact that drugs have impacted her memory (‘I don’t know, I can’t remember. The lesson to be learnt is this: Do not take drugs, it f***s your brain.’). It is also my belief that her memory loss is trauma-induced.”

Sandra, born a boy and named Peter, suffered horribly as a child, neglected and abused by his adoptive family. Kicked out of home at seventeen, finding work as a fitter and turner, he was married at nineteen, and a father by the age of twenty. Shortly after the birth of his second son however, he deserts his wife, having finally discovered a community that is accepting of a long denied truth, Peter is transgender. What follows is a double course of female hormones, a career as a drag performer and a sex worker, a long period of partying, drink and drug taking, a series of name changes, sex reassignment surgery, and several relationships that do not end well. Eventually Sandra settles down, becoming a successful businesswoman, then a trophy wife to a much older man. But when she is widowed, Sandra is forced to reinvent herself again, and despite ill health (her liver is damaged, and she is in need of a lung transplant), she starts a domestic cleaning agency, which eventually evolves into Specialised Trauma Cleaning.
I imagine that Sandra is a woman who is in possession of great personal charisma, and it’s clear that Krasnostein grew to greatly admire her during the time she spent with her, evidenced by the way that the author largely glosses over Sandra’s flaws, and in the occasional florid turn of phrase that seems designed to obfuscate less palatable truths. However, Sandra’s life experiences are fascinating, and as flawed as she may be, she is undoubtedly a remarkable, resilient woman, who has led an extraordinary life.

“We specialise in the unpleasant tasks that you need to have taken care of.”

On the job with Sandra, accompanied by Sarah, we visit a handful of contracted assignments, among them; a woman tortured by mental illness who shares her home with rats, broken furniture and adorns the walls with ‘art’ that illustrates her pain; the small apartment in which a young woman overdosed, and remained undiscovered for weeks; and the home of a elderly woman with a carpet of champagne bottles, and barricades of wine casks. The squalor, and the smell, of these, and other circumstances, is well described, but for most of us can only be imagined. The type of work STC undertakes is clearly unpleasant physical labour, but it is also obvious that interacting with the clients of the service requires a person with a very specific set of skills, which Sandra undeniably possesses.

“Compassion. Great compassion, great dignity and a good sense of humor ’cause you’re gonna need it. And a really good sense of not being able to take the smell in, cause they stink. Putrid.”

Though I wanted to read The Trauma Cleaner because of a somewhat ghoulish interest in the subject of trauma cleaning, I wasn’t really all that disappointed to find that this book focused so heavily on Sandra’s personal life. It is, all told, a compelling portrayal of an amazing woman, and her unusual work.