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A review by michaelontheplanet
The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman's Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay, and Disaster by Sarah Krasnostein
2.0
High maintenance: forget Dame Edna, this is Melbourne’s housewife superstar now. Sandra Pankhurst, wife, businesswoman, abuse survivor, trans woman. Considering she shifted sex in 1977, in Australia, this is someone who’s seriously got her shit together.
Or not, for as a misery memoir this takes some beating. Pankhurst sounds part-nightmare, part-hero in about equal measure and comes out of this execrably-written book with a measure of dignity despite the chaos wrought around her. Her work - as a trauma cleaner, picking up after those too confused, incapable or dead to run a tidy household - is an anchor, the banality of daily misery a counterweight to the horrors she’s endured. It can get a bit Priscilla in places (“come home to the wo-man in your life”) but there’s a sweetness and determination that offsets this. Even though her voice can probably strip paint off cars at 50 metres, I’d want her on my side rather than the opposition’s.
Or not, for as a misery memoir this takes some beating. Pankhurst sounds part-nightmare, part-hero in about equal measure and comes out of this execrably-written book with a measure of dignity despite the chaos wrought around her. Her work - as a trauma cleaner, picking up after those too confused, incapable or dead to run a tidy household - is an anchor, the banality of daily misery a counterweight to the horrors she’s endured. It can get a bit Priscilla in places (“come home to the wo-man in your life”) but there’s a sweetness and determination that offsets this. Even though her voice can probably strip paint off cars at 50 metres, I’d want her on my side rather than the opposition’s.