THE ELISSAS

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.