The Trauma Cleaner

December 11, 2017
Krasnostein, an Australian legal academic, profiles transgender trauma cleaner Sandra Pankhurst in this intriguing but vexing debut biography. Pankhurst runs a small business cleaning homes marred by blood, feces, drugs, mold, and garbage, but her personal history proves more fascinating. Krasnostein explores this history in chapters that alternate with cleaning-site visits. Six of the eight visits feature hoarders or squalor; two are to sites where accidental deaths occurred. Krasnostein details each site with tragic if repetitive effect, but rarely convincingly ties them to Pankhurst’s life story. Born male and subsequently adopted and abused, Pankhurst eventually landed a blue-collar job, a wife, a drug addiction, and a prostitution habit, and helped raise two children, whom he abandoned to pursue a sex-change. After undergoing surgery, Pankhurst became a funeral director, married a wealthy husband, lost a business, then started a new one. At times she displays a violent temper, cheats on her spouses, exploits her employees, dismisses other trans people, and neglects her children, leaving them in poverty. Krasnostein downplays the complexity of Pankhurst’s existence in favor of a glowing paean laden with cloying therapy-couch clichés and overwrought metaphors (“I listened to Sandra’s news like it was the middle of the Han dynasty and she had just returned west from the Silk Road”). A complex protagonist makes for engaging material, but Krasnostein’s fawning adulation minimizes and excuses her subject’s flaws in favor of creating an inspirational story that never quite rings true.

Starred review from March 1, 2018
As journalist Krasnostein trails the titular trauma cleaner Sandra Parkhurst while she tidies the houses of all manner of hoarders and the places where people have died in all manner of terrible ways (and frequently been left to rot afterward), the pair encounters a moldering cornucopia of awful, often-frightening smells. Had this uniquely gifted and nuanced chronicler of offensive odors stuck with describing the fragrance of ancient dried blood, antediluvian dust, and unspeakable effluents, Krasnostein's debut would be memorable enough, but her subject's life story is more remarkable and often just as harrowing as the scent of the derelict apartments she excavates for a living. Adopted into a family that trounces the Dursleys in both favoritism and hostile neglect, Parkhurst had the near-catastrophic misfortune of being born transgender in Australia at a time long before such a designation was even conceivable. After an attempt at normality, Parkhurst turns to prostitution and drug abuse. Krasnostein encounters Parkhurst in the third iteration of her life: an aging widow with a terminal illness, a thriving business cleaning up putrid dwellings, and a miraculously chipper attitude. Through countless encounters with the fetid, the neglected, and the downright tragic, Parkhurst has found meaning and peace, and Krasnostein a singular subject whom she approaches with well-deserved awe.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

July 27, 2017
Sandra Pankhurst was adopted through the Catholic Church in the 1950s by a Melbourne couple who would prove to be horrendously abusive parents. Driven out of home by the age of 17, she would go on to be many things: husband, father, drag queen, sex worker, gender reassignment patient, funeral director and wife, as well as the titular trauma cleaner. Written with sensitivity, insight and warmth, The Trauma Cleaner captures Sandra’s resilience as well as her connection with the people that she works with through her Specialised Trauma Cleaning Services company. Through Sandra’s work, we gain a privileged insight into the homes of people affected by trauma and witness the astounding empathy with which Sandra approaches each case, be it hoarding, suicide or drug overdose. Sandra’s search for belonging and quest to become truly herself are profoundly moving and her fortitude is admirable, though not always wholly sympathetic. Her failing memory makes her a somewhat unreliable narrator, but writer Sarah Krasnostein has pieced together a compelling history through careful research and interviews. The Trauma Cleaner is no ordinary trauma narrative: we see how the infliction of multiple traumas has left this fascinating woman uniquely placed to restore order among the despair of others, and it is with similar care that Krasnostein has produced this book. Portia Lindsay is the general manager of the Mudgee Readers’ Festival