Cirrus@Austlit

'Exploring dislocation and longing, Sarah Krasnostein dives into Peter Carey's literary tour de force, True History of the Kelly Gang, in this latest offering from the stunning Writers on Writers essay series.

'Award-winning writer Sarah Krasnostein shines new light on the impossibly vulnerable Ned Kelly of Peter Carey's True History of the Kelly Gang. Carey, who moved from Australia to America, conjured Kelly after seeing Sidney Nolan's paintings of the bushranger at the Met. In this moving essay Krasnostein, who moved from America to Australia, interrogates notions of home, history, distance and identity in Peter Carey's Booker Prize-winning novel.

'In the Writers on Writers series, leading writers reflect on another Australian writer who has inspired and fascinated them. Provocative and crisp, these books start a fresh conversation between past and present, shed new light on the craft of writing, and introduce some intriguing and talented authors and their work.

'Published by Black Inc. in association with the University of Melbourne and State Library Victoria.' (Publication summary)

'The apartment had a strange and abiding habit of swallowing noise. It was on the ground floor of a brownstone on a quiet street in Manhattan, and though it was tiny, and lacked doors, we could not hear each other calling from different rooms. The wi-fi password was ‘city garden’ and I believe that’s really what the owner saw. Not the deep layer of dirt coating the floors that turned our socks black as we took our first steps around the rooms, increasingly confused. Not the dust heaped in every corner, fluffy as fleece. Or the silverfish undulating across bookshelves. Or the cracked toilet or the broken air-conditioner or the sink long leaking water into the warped wood around it. There was a compacted stratum of document files and dog toys and ripped books and heavy silver trays and dead cockroaches and photo albums and tangles of wires jammed tight under every piece of furniture. And a mottled grey stripe running along the wall from bedroom to bathroom, a story about the self and how it is steadied in the night.' (Introduction)

'A conversation between authors Sarah Krasnostein and Chloe Hooper. Together they discuss Krasnostein's latest work, The Believer.' 

'Dorothy’s front door wouldn’t open. So they took it off its hinges.

'[We] were confronted immediately by a wall of garbage, decades upon decades of accumulated detritus,” says Sarah Krasnostein, author of The Trauma Cleaner. Dorothy’s impenetrable house was in a wealthy suburb, not far from a cafe that made raw almond milk. Krasnostein had arrived there with Sandra Pankhurst, the 63-year-old owner and operator of Specialised Trauma Cleaning Services.' (Introduction)

'I call my dad from the car and ask him about his morning, tell him about mine.

'‘What kind of hoarder was she?’ he asks.

'‘Books and cats, mainly,’ I tell the man who loves his cats and who I know is now actively considering his extensive book collection.

'‘What’s the difference between a private library and a book hoarder?’ he wonders.

'We are both silent before we laugh and answer in unison: ‘Faeces.’

'But the difference is this phone call. And the others like it I could make—and how strong we are when we are loved.

'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 forty years. A man who bled quietly to death in his loungeroom. A woman who lives with rats, random debris and terrified delusion. The still life of a home vacated by accidental overdose.

'Sarah Krasnostein has watched the extraordinary Sandra Pankhurst bring order and care to these, the living and the dead—and the book she has written is equally extraordinary. Not just the compelling story of a fascinating life among lives of desperation, but an affirmation that, as isolated as we may feel, we are all in this together.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.