Samantha Leach Explores the Inner Lives of Three Teenage Girls in The Elissas

At the center of The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia, Bustle editor Samantha Leach’s gripping work of memoir and reportage, sits an indelible image and a grim coincidence. Three girls with nearly identical names, Elissa, Alissa, and Alyssa, met at a so-called “therapeutic” boarding school for teenagers and bonded over cheeky resilience in the face of what Leach describes as the school’s harsh tactics. To cement their friendship, all three got cryptic matching tattoos reading “Save Our Souls.” A decade later, all three women would die in tragic circumstances before the age of 27.

When Leach first saw the tattoos, she looked at them with a bit of jealousy and disdain. Elissa was Leach’s childhood best friend, but they had begun to drift in their teen years. An early brush with rebellion put Leach back on the straight and narrow, but Elissa was sent to a series of boarding schools that were a part of what we would now call the troubled-teen industry. As Leach writes, at age 18, still dealing with the trauma she incurred at the schools, Elissa died after a bout of severe encephalitis.

By 2019, Leach was living in New York City with the type of journalism job she had been dreaming about since she and Elissa were children flipping through magazines. But her friend’s tragic loss left a mark, and she started researching Elissa’s final years out of a desire to understand why their paths had diverged so profoundly.

“It really started from a place of grief and a place of deep curiosity and not wanting to let go. It’s a very strange thing to lose years with somebody and then immediately lose them altogether,” Leach explained over a lemonade at a café near her apartment this summer. When Elissa was away, occasionally calling in moments of boredom or crisis, Leach would try to imagine what her friend was going through. “I had all these memories—not true memories, but my thoughts of what was going on with her. I’d hear little things, like they take your shoes sometimes or that there’s a lot of wearing white. I had these over-the-top images that burnished my desire to know what had happened.”

As Leach worked on the book, the troubled-teen industry became a renewed topic of public discourse after Paris Hilton came forward with her experiences of abuse at a therapeutic boarding school. In her 2020 documentary, This Is Paris, the reality star talks about the lingering effects of her teenage experiences of isolation and abuse.

Leach said she saw a reflection of Hilton’s experiences of the things she learned during her research for The Elissas, and the way programs in the troubled-teen industry teaches teenagers to mask their emotions. “These are institutions that teach you masks are the best thing, so of course she put a face on,” Leach said. “They run on operant conditioning—get your points, comply. Of course that leads you to create a persona for yourself when you’re deprived and lose any sense of personhood.”

Eventually, three years of reporting and researching led Leach to realize that the story of the Elissas dovetailed with some of the thorniest social issues of our times, from increasing fears over girls’ mental health to the opioid crisis.The book that resulted is an indictment of modern girlhood and our culture’s obsession with quick-fix psychological pseudoscience.

Leach sat down with Vanity Fair to discuss writing through grief, the contours of the troubled-teen industry, and the lessons her friend’s story has for understanding teenagers today.

Vanity Fair: One thing that comes through in the book, especially in the beginning, is how much you adored Elissa. She comes off as a bit of a spitfire, that sparkly, outgoing friend who everyone wants to be around. You portray yourself as her sidekick in the beginning, but you also complicate that story, and are pretty honest about the ways that you misbehaved or acted out as a teenager. Why did you decide to complicate that trope?

Samantha Leach: I’ve loved so many stories about the sparkly friend and the less sparkly friend, or the friend with blond hair and the friend with brown hair, the student and the nonstudent. But I really didn’t want it to feel that flat, not that all those stories are flat. I just felt like we’ve seen that before and it can feel like that there’s no escaping that binary. But I was like, nah, I’m not that, I’ve done my own fair share of shit and I needed to be honest. Besides, I was going to tell everybody else’s secrets. So I thought, let me spill some of my own.

The book reminded me of the recent statistics about how teenage girls are facing a mental health crisis. But you’re talking about the early 2000s, and you really focus on the contours of what it was like to be a teen then—the fashion, the ways of communicating with each other. In a way, the experiences of the Elissas feels a bit like the prehistory of whatever is going on right now.