Sarah Krasnostein

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 show more 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. show less

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 show more 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.) show less

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 show more 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. show less

I understand that many readers are disappointed by this book because it does not meet the usual true crime criteria and they expected something different. For me, however, who is not a true crime buff, it was a very good book.

The three Australian woman writers accompanied the trial of Erin Patterson, who invited four of her relatives to lunch and poisoned them by hiding mushrooms in a Beef Wellington, killing three of them. The authors taped their conversations about the trial and thought show more about turning those tapes into a podcast, but then published them as a book. This audiobook was than narrated from that book, so it's not comprised of the original tapes. It is obvious that the text was edited, but it still felt quite natural to me.

I have been kind of morbidly fascinated by this case since I first read about it, and one thing I liked about the book is that the authors try to explain where that fascination comes from - the archetype of the female poisoner, the reversal of women's traditional role of feeding and nurturing, the marriage drama, the Midsomer Murders-like storyline. The conversation flows freely and touches upon many topics. It traces the progress of the trial, but also includes the personal thoughts of the authors, their observations and how they respond to what they see. They also analyze what the story might signify in the wider context of society and why many people, especially women, are so interested in true crime.

While not all the contents were equally intriguing, I really liked listening to the thoughts of these three women. I learned a lot about the actual case, but the discussions of the sociology of it all were even more compelling. show less