'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.
Epigraph: Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation - the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example,be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up
'Sarah Krasnostein’s The Trauma Cleaner has won many awards since it was published in 2017, including the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Australian Book Industry Award General Non-Fiction Book of the Year.' (Introduction)
'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)
'Sandra Pankhurst is no ordinary cleaner. The subject of Sarah Krasnostein’s biography, The Trauma Cleaner, this Melbourne businesswoman is one of the most extraordinary characters you will ever find in a work of non-fiction. Pankhurst’s company, Specialised Trauma Cleaners, deals with crime scenes, “unattended deaths” and hoarders’ houses. Staff in white plastic suits rip up sewage-drenched carpet, wipe bloodstains from walls, and dispose of decades of rubbish.' (Introduction)
'This is a book as multifaceted as its subject. It’s a meticulously put-together biography of a fastidiously groomed woman whose business it is to clean up after murder, suicide and hoarding messes. It’s a wondrous portrait of an inspiring character who has been, at various times in her life, the wife of a respectable man, the devoted lover of another, a rape survivor, a sex worker and drag queen with a pregnant girlfriend, a husband and father and a sadistically abused young boy. It’s an eloquent discourse on trauma, pain and ways of coping, or not. It’s a history of the law and policing in Victoria with regard to its LGBTQI community. It’s a jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing, some permanently disordered and others willed into creation. It’s the frequently surprising and sometimes funny story of a potty-mouthed transgender businesswoman and long-time Liberal Party supporter.' (Introduction)
'This is a book as multifaceted as its subject. It’s a meticulously put-together biography of a fastidiously groomed woman whose business it is to clean up after murder, suicide and hoarding messes. It’s a wondrous portrait of an inspiring character who has been, at various times in her life, the wife of a respectable man, the devoted lover of another, a rape survivor, a sex worker and drag queen with a pregnant girlfriend, a husband and father and a sadistically abused young boy. It’s an eloquent discourse on trauma, pain and ways of coping, or not. It’s a history of the law and policing in Victoria with regard to its LGBTQI community. It’s a jigsaw puzzle with some pieces missing, some permanently disordered and others willed into creation. It’s the frequently surprising and sometimes funny story of a potty-mouthed transgender businesswoman and long-time Liberal Party supporter.' (Introduction)
'Sandra Pankhurst is no ordinary cleaner. The subject of Sarah Krasnostein’s biography, The Trauma Cleaner, this Melbourne businesswoman is one of the most extraordinary characters you will ever find in a work of non-fiction. Pankhurst’s company, Specialised Trauma Cleaners, deals with crime scenes, “unattended deaths” and hoarders’ houses. Staff in white plastic suits rip up sewage-drenched carpet, wipe bloodstains from walls, and dispose of decades of rubbish.' (Introduction)
'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)
'Sarah Krasnostein’s The Trauma Cleaner has won many awards since it was published in 2017, including the Victorian Prize for Literature and the Australian Book Industry Award General Non-Fiction Book of the Year.' (Introduction)
