Samantha Leach is the entertainment editor at large at Bustle. She has also written for Glamour, Elle, NYLON, and many other publications. The Elissas is her first book.
"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
"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
"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
"[A] high-wire act of writing about privilege and the pain of
losing your oldest friend." --Vogue
"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
"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
"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
"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
"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
"An intimate, moving narrative peppered with harsh statistics,
love, angst, and the author's own admirable
vulnerability."--Library Journal (Starred)
"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
"...a searing exposé."--Publisher's Weekly (Starred Review)
"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
"[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
"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
"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
"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
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