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

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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. This isn’t a bad book, you know its heart is in the right place, but Sarah does not do herself any favours with her real florid prose. At the drop of a hat she will rhapsodise about Sandra Despite seeing the same shit each day for 21 years, Sandra treats each client as unique in their circumstance and equal in their dignity. I asked her once how she manages to maintain that attitude of compassion and absolute non-judgment” Krasnostein is prone to making such sweeping statements without any supporting detail or commentary from Sandra showing she believes this. I really don’t want to say much more about Sandra’s story or that of her clients. That is for the reader to discover. What I’d like to tell you about is what makes this story so special and why I grew so fond of Sandra and the author, Sarah Krasnostein.

The Naked Civil Servant by Quentin Crisp - the autobiography of a defiantly effeminate gay man with perfect recall 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.Eventually the traumatised child grows to be a man and marries and has two sons. When his gay side, his drag queen side, makes it impossible to remain married, he leaves, taking the car and leaving his wife with the house, the mortgage and the children. He couldn't care less about anyone but himself. 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. It is interesting that an author would even attempt a full life biography of a woman with a self-professed faulty memory, and then continue to remind the reader that this or that may not be accurate throughout the book. It casts doubt on the entire story. Author Sarah Krasnostein is very much a part of the book and the story. She followed Sandra Pankhurst to various cleaning scenes over a four year period. At the end of the first chapter Krasnostein describes this book as a love letter to Sandra. Krasnostein’s admiration and affection for Sandra is apparent through the book, with such sentiment as: “I have the rapturous experience, many times, of simply listening to her swear.” The chapters which deal with trauma cleaning are seemingly told by Krasnostein as the observer. But by placing herself in the story she gets in the way. These chapter are interesting, but are little more than a documentation of what Krasnostein sees. The chapters which reveal Sandra’s life history are told from a third person point of view and while gut-wrenching, held little interest given the expectation from the title. The transitions in point of view from chapter to chapter make the book a little difficult to read.

This book is about Sandra Pankhurst, who created a trauma clean up company, which does decomposition clean ups to hoarding clean ups. The focus through the stories we are told about Sandra undertaking the clean up jobs is her compassion towards all of the people she helps with no judgement. Unlike Sandra, I identify with the gender assigned to me at birth. I was loved and protected and cared for by people who (generally speaking) had their act together when it came to parenting. I was sheltered from anything different or criminal or “other” than the traditional white nuclear family way of life. Mcleod’s major misstep is adding unnecessary reenactments’ … a still from Clean. Photograph: Narelle Portanier/MIFF 2022Homicides 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.

Sarah Krasnostein does a marvellous job of illuminating Sandra Pankhurst the person…it’s the vignettes of Pankhurst’s early life and upbringing in Melbourne, interspersed throughout the book, that make for compelling reading.’ She passed away after an extraordinary life with her family around her and her dog Moet,” Matisse Mitelman said. “The relationship started as a lawyer and client but it developed into a much broader and more diffuse friendship. She’s a spectacular and incredibly empathetic person.” This is a work of non-fiction and in it, Sarah Krasnostein accompanies Sandra Pankhurst in her work as a trauma cleaner. Sandra and her team have specialized in cleaning and clearing out houses that have become close to uninhabitable, often due to years of hoarding, sometimes due to a murder or suicide. I found the chapters that focused on Sandra’s work incredibly interesting even though they made me deeply uncomfortable at times. But all I can say is WOW WOW WOW. Sarah Krasnostein did a terrific job writing this book - sentence after sentence was beautiful and deeply felt - often sharing her own relationship to Sandra - but the real heroine is Sandra Pankhurst. Book or no book....yet some life stories REALLY DESERVE to be written ....and this is one of them. 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…Maybe he has it in for her. Maybe he has it in for dykes. Maybe he’s jealous of her. Maybe he’s jealous of the girlfriend. Maybe he’s repulsed that he’s jealous of either of them […] Maybe he just wants to feel the force of bone on muscle. I loved this book, I initially wanted to read it because I am a fan of books about the macabre, serial killers and the clean-up after.

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