The Trauma Cleaner is the biography of Sandra Pankhurst, an Australian woman who runs an extreme cleaning company. Clearing out hoarders' houses, cleaning up the place where a dead body has been found, Sandra has made a living out of cleaning up the residue of other people's trauma, and Krasnostein weaves this vocation in with Sandra's own traumatic past.

Sandra is a trans woman, and throughout her life has experienced many traumas and violations, both physical and emotional. She's been a sex worker, a business owner and a trophy wife (her words) in her attempts to carve out her own personhood in the wake of an abusive childhood.
She's a really complicated narrative subject; many of her decisions have been quite objectively selfish, but there's always the question of survival at the root of her actions (although, in all honesty, she does tend to excuse her own dreadful behaviour at the expense of others and then completely fail to recognise the impact her selfishness has on others - see walking out on her children and then refusing to apologise...). She makes for a difficult interviewee, unable to remember vast swathes of her life due to the effect of abuse and illness, but this doesn't negatively impact the book; if anything, it makes Sandra more human. None of us remembers everything, and it asks questions of who we are if not our memory.

Krasnostein sensibly keeps her own narrative to the periphery of the book, and lets Sandra's story take centre stage. At its heart, this is a book about creating one's identity when it has been destroyed, and how we often externalise our trauma through our behaviour. It's a hard read at times, but overall worthwhile.