Publishers Weekly
★ 04/10/2023
Bustle editor-at-large Leach debuts with a deeply personal investigation into the tragic fate of her childhood friend, Elissa, and the role the “Troubled Teen Industry” played in her death at age 18. Like the female celebrities she emulated (Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian), Elissa was a wealthy suburban teenager who partied, drank, and cultivated a “slutty reputation” to garner popularity. During her sophomore year of high school, Elissa’s parents transferred her to Arizona’s Spring Ridge Academy, the first stop in a string of therapeutic boarding schools that promised to curb her troubled behavior. The reality, according to Leach, is that these unregulated, for-profit institutions prey on wealthy parents’ anxieties while often exacerbating their children’s problems. Drawing on interviews with parents, friends, and acquaintances, Leach recounts in often harrowing detail how Elissa and two of her classmates, Alyssa and Alissa, ended up at Ponca Pines Academy in Nebraska, and details the circumstances that would see all three die before turning 27 (Alyssa overdosed on heroin; Elissa and Alissa both succumbed to illnesses that may have been linked to their addictions). Noting that as many as 50,000 teenagers enter the Troubled Teen Industry each year, Leach also profiles activists who are fighting to uncover its abuses and incisively analyzes the “societal pressures” placed on upper-middle-class girls in America. It’s a searing exposé. (June)
From the Publisher
Like the Furies and the Fates of Greek mythology, the subjects of Samantha Leach’s The Elissas are troubled and troubling young women enacting a drama that feels both ancient and inevitable. If the addiction narrative has ascended to the level of myth in America (and it’s all too easy to argue that it has), then Elissa, Alyssa and Alissa are a familiar archetype: poor little rich girls, young and rebellious, their problems surely solvable by Daddy’s money. In this smart and gripping debut, Leach refreshes a familiar heartbreak by weaving the stories of these three lost young women into a larger, more complicated and ultimately tragic narrative of a nation not so much losing the war on drugs as on a death march every bit as doomed as the last battles in Sparta.”—New York Times
“…a searing exposé.”—Publisher’s Weekly (Starred Review)
"An intimate, moving narrative peppered with harsh statistics, love, angst, and the author’s own admirable vulnerability."—Library Journal (Starred)
“[Leach] develops sensitive portraits of each girl and suggests how social pressures, combined with health and environmental factors, conspired to damage the minds and then destroy the bodies of three vulnerable young women. A poignant and heartfelt mix of sociology and memoir.” —Kirkus
“Leach takes the reader through this harrowing, heartbreaking story . . . With great care, she reveals the paths that led these girls’ deaths at 18, 23, and 26, when their lives should have just been beginning. The loss is enormous, and Leach painstakingly, lovingly, braids their stories into one indelible work.”—Glamour
“The Elissas is elegiac and investigative in equal measure. Leach channels her grief from her early friend’s loss into compassionate, poignant reporting—and one of the best nonfiction books of the summer.”—Harper's Bazaar
"In this urgent expose of the long-term trauma caused by the troubled teen industry, Samantha Leach investigates the life of a close friend lost to addiction, and the two girls who shared a friendship with her at boarding school and also perished far too young. These lives cut short unmask the brutal social control behind the concept of reform schools, where well-off parents pay thousands to have their children beaten, starved, abused, and otherwise coerced into toeing the line." —CrimeReads
"When Bustle editor at large Samantha Leach’s childhood best friend, Elissa, passed away at the age of eighteen, she was understandably devastated and confused. In seeking answers about her friend’s untimely death, Leach uncovered a complex story; the years before she died, Elissa had been living at one of the many unregulated boarding programs that make up America’s scandal-ridden troubled teen industry. As Leach further investigated what happened to her friend, she learned of Alyssa and Alissa, Elissa’s closest friends at the school who, in addition to sharing a penchant for partying and matching Save Our Souls tattoos, also died young, in their early twenties. The Elissas explores the secret lives of wealthy young suburban women, the impacts of reform school, and the fate that led to their paths diverging in such a tragic way."—W Magazine
"Leach’s exploration of the troubled teen industry and suburban girlhood is heart-wrenching, culminating in a book in the same addictive vein as Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women."—Nylon
“[A] high-wire act of writing about privilege and the pain of losing your oldest friend.” —Vogue
“Leach was deeply inspired by Three Women by Lisa Taddeo, but unlike Taddeo’s book, The Elissas reaches beyond the lives of Elissa, Alyssa, and Alissa and examines the larger forces that shaped their course of their lives, that sparked and fed their rebellion: pop culture, including Leach and Elissa’s treasured The Simple Life, the Troubled Teen Industry, and the opioid epidemic.”—Rumpus
“Chilling . . . Drawing on interviews with parents, friends and acquaintances, Leach details how the girls ended up at Ponca Pines and how the system failed them so severely. It’s a powerful indictment of how little we understand about treating addiction and other mental health issues.”—PureWow
“In The Elissas, Samantha Leach writes with great compassion about the pressures on girls to live up to today’s punishing beauty standards. With insight and precision, Leach exposes the ways in which the so-called Troubled Teen Industry preys upon girls’ vulnerability and capitalizes on their parents’ naivete—and bank accounts. The Elissas is both a deeply personal story of loss and an indictment of the societal forces that contributed to robbing a young woman of those closest to her. Leach’s investigation into how the Elissas perished adds much to our understanding of how dangerous misogyny can be to the health and well-being of girls and young women.”—Nancy Jo Sales, New York Times bestselling author of American Girls and Nothing Personal
“Rebellious and real, troubled yet hopeful, The Elissas presents an abiding portrait of friendship forged in the coercive clutches of upper and middle class America. From the basements of suburban homes to the innermost workings of the Troubled Teen industry, Samantha Leach holds a magnifying glass to adolescent girlhood and the capitalist forces that equate youth with desirability, beauty with success, safety with secrecy.”—Allie Rowbottom, author of Aesthetica and Jell-O Girls
“A decade after losing her best friend, Samantha Leach is haunted by her loss. Why was she spared the fate that befell Elissa? In incisive, fearless prose Leach investigates the realities of the Troubled Teen Industry and reevaluates her own role in the chaos and rebellion of adolescence. There are hard truths about girlhood, friendship, and boundaries in The Elissas, each of them heart-rending and ultimately, inspiring.”—Stephanie Danler, New York Times bestselling author of Sweetbitter and Stray
“Samantha Leach's The Elissas is a compelling fusion of memoir, reportage and cultural analysis that serves as both a damning indictment of the exploitative troubled teen industry and a compassionate look at the young people who have fallen prey to it.”—Sam Lansky, author of The Gilded Razor
"It's a shocking story...I think there is so much honesty and vulnerability in the book. Even now, I think Gen Z readers will relate to the pressures and the culture and the honesty that Leach has around her relationship to shame."—Emily Ratajkowski
New York Times bestselling author of American Girl Nancy Jo Sales
In The Elissas, Samantha Leach writes with great compassion about the pressures on girls to live up to today’s punishing beauty standards. With insight and precision, Leach exposes the ways in which the so-called Troubled Teen Industry preys upon girls’ vulnerability and capitalizes on their parents’ naivete—and bank accounts. The Elissas is both a deeply personal story of loss and an indictment of the societal forces that contributed to robbing a young woman of those closest to her. Leach’s investigation into how the Elissas perished adds much to our understanding of how dangerous misogyny can be to the health and well-being of girls and young women.
New York Times bestselling author of Sweetbitter a Stephanie Danler
A decade after losing her best friend, Samantha Leach is haunted by her loss. Why was she spared the fate that befell Elissa? In incisive, fearless prose Leach investigates the realities of the Troubled Teen Industry and reevaluates her own role in the chaos and rebellion of adolescence. There are hard truths about girlhood, friendship, and boundaries in The Elissas, each of them heart-rending and ultimately, inspiring.
author of The Gilded Razor Sam Lansky
Samantha Leach's The Elissas is a compelling fusion of memoir, reportage and cultural analysis that serves as both a damning indictment of the exploitative troubled teen industry and a compassionate look at the young people who have fallen prey to it.
author of Aesthetica and Jell-O Girls Allie Rowbottom
Rebellious and real, troubled yet hopeful, The Elissas presents an abiding portrait of friendship forged in the coercive clutches of upper and middle class America. From the basements of suburban homes to the innermost workings of the Troubled Teen industry, Samantha Leach holds a magnifying glass to adolescent girlhood and the capitalist forces that equate youth with desirability, beauty with success, safety with secrecy.
Publisher’s Weekly (Starred Review)
…a searing exposé.
Library Journal
★ 06/01/2023
Bustle editor Leach's debut is an intimate picture of three friends—Elissa, Alyssa, and Alissa—and their tragic deaths before the age of 30. It is also a scathing exposé of the troubled-teen industry, a system of underregulated residential youth programs aimed at struggling teenagers. The book explains the detrimental effects that one such boarding school had on the three subjects of this book and other young women. Readers will learn that Elissa was Leach's childhood friend who became a rebellious teenager. She was sent to Ponca Pines Academy, a privately owned rehabilitation boarding center, where she met Alyssa and Alissa. Through untold hours of research and dedicated interviews with the girls' families and friends, the author recounts the struggles and trauma they endured at the school, including isolation, verbal abuse, and pseudo-scientific therapies. Each resisted the program in their own way, often with drugs, sex, and alcohol, and coping mechanisms more profound after graduating. VERDICT An intimate, moving narrative peppered with harsh statistics, love, angst, and the author's own admirable vulnerability.—Jack Phoenix
Kirkus Reviews
2023-03-08
A Bustle entertainment editor examines the lives and deaths of three young women who were also products of therapeutic boarding schools.
Rhode Island native Leach met Elissa—who would eventually befriend two girls named Alyssa and Alissa—when both were infants. Raised by suburban “parents with means and access,” all four girls experimented with drinking and drugs, “rebellious behaviors that were of the socially acceptable, suburban variety—until they became something greater, more fearful.” Leach would be the only one who reached age 26. Drawing on her memories and interviews with countless people involved in the girls’ lives, Leach subsumed her grief into a quest to understand how she had managed to survive what the other girls did not. Like Elissa, the author fell under the spell of media stars like Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie, whose “rehab stints, public meltdowns, breakups and hookups” transformed them into icons of cool and, more insidiously, into models of the disordered behavior that plagued the Elissas. As a teen, the author, shy around boys, “delved in the booze,” while Alyssa flaunted her sexuality and fell in love with a boy who introduced her to heroin. In high school, Leach chose to express rebellion through hipster bohemianism, and the more stubbornly defiant Elissa was sent to therapeutic boarding schools. At one of them—Ponca Pines—Elissa met Alyssa and Alissa, two hard-living girls with whom she formed the troubled triumvirate that fascinated Leach to the point of obsession. The author refrains from indicting either Ponca Pines or the “Troubled Teen Industry” for the girls’ deaths, which happened after they left. Instead, she develops sensitive portraits of each girl and suggests how social pressures, combined with health and environmental factors, conspired to damage the minds and then destroy the bodies of three vulnerable young women.
A poignant and heartfelt mix of sociology and memoir.
