If you saw her on the street, you wouldn’t look twice. It is the care with which Sarah Krasnostein addresses these challenges that makes her debut book The Trauma Cleaner (Text Publishing) such an anomalous, indelible treasure.īorn out of a 2014 longform essay, the book’s subject is Sandra Pankhurst, a sixty-something woman from Melbourne’s outer suburbs. Without that base of existing interest, the biographer faces the mammoth task of rapidly establishing why the reader should care. An obscure writer, however, is less likely to convince publisher or readers to invest money and time in the biography of a person who is unknown not only to them, but to the wider world. As established writers with guaranteed readerships, Eggers and Orlean had access to platforms that offset this risk. To invest in the life of an unknown person is to gamble on uncertain economic returns. The relative paucity of books in this vein is partly due to the commercial imperatives of publishing – while first-person memoir and autobiographies allow writers to distil moments of moments of glory and grace in their own lives (indeed, the noughties personal-essay boom fed ravenously off this principle), it’s comparatively rare to encounter a biography of an ordinary person that does the same. Television series such as Australian Story and podcasts like This American Life serve a similar function, revealing hidden contours in the landscape of ostensible ordinariness. Such books often detail the lives of ordinary people thrust into extraordinary situations – think of Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun, in which Abdulrahman Zeitoun travels via canoe to assist New Orleanians in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina or Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, which traces horticulturalist John Laroche’s descent into the obscure but lurid world of orchid poaching. More rare is a biography of a regular person, whose name and story are entirely unfamiliar to readers. In all these cases, the subject’s significance is already well established before the book is published: readers know the outline of their story, and expect the biography to fill in the details of that sketch.

Often, their faces are familiar from magazines and newspapers or the evening news. They are sports stars, musicians, politicians, actors, war heroes, artists, businesspeople (even, increasingly, YouTube stars). Their subjects have achieved some level of fame or infamy their notoriety may derive from pre-existing celebrity, from attaining great success in their field, perhaps even from criminal activity. There are several types of narrative that currently dominate the biography genre.

The Trauma Cleaner by Sarah Krasnostein