Though Sandra had gone through more than her fair share of hardship, her story is also an inspiring one. In fact, some of the events of our life seem so far out there, that part of the story read more like a fiction novel than a biography.

Sandra’s story is truly fascinating as she has gone through more ups and downs than most of us can even begin to imagine. She has also had to endure much transphobic abuse and hostility surrounding her transition. It’s in these personal stories where we follow Sandra’s struggle with gender identity as she moves from suffering at the hands of abusive parents to her estrangement from her children as well as all of her friends after her transitioning process.Īs Sandra’s personal history unfolds for us, we witness harrowing events such as her life as a child during which she was beaten, starved, ignored and forced to live in a shack outside of her home the time she spent as a prostitute a shocking event where she was beaten, raped and nearly murdered by a client and the night that the person with whom she was in love with was brutally murdered right in front of her.

The Trauma Cleaner is also about Sandra’s personal life in which we learn that she began life as a boy named Peter and during her childhood, suffered horribly at the hands of an alcoholic and abusive father. As she does so, we get to hear the stories of the some of the hoarders all of which I found quite fascinating.īut this isn’t just a look at the business of trauma cleaning, though that part is quite interesting. But in addition to cleaning up, Sandra enters into the lives of the occupants, gently leading them and guiding them to hopefully a better way of living, away from the hoarding and the filth. The book provides vivid descriptions of people, many of them hoarders, living in feces-invested homes with rats, roaches, flies, rotting food, mold-lined walls, rotted floors, and nearly unbearable stench, all of which the author witnessed firsthand as she accompanied Sandra and her crew to various scenes over a four year period.

In this book, we follow along with the Sandra and the author as we enter a few of these sites and some of the descriptions thereof are pretty horrendous. What Sandra and her crew of cleaners do, is to enter the properties of suicide victims, murder victims, hoarders, and drug addicts and cleans them up. The Trauma Cleaner is part memoir, part biography that follows a transgender woman named Sandra Pankhurst, owner of a trauma cleaning business.

The Trauma Cleaner by Sarah Krasnostein