PRESS FOR THE ELISSAS

  • “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

  • “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

  • “[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’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

  • “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

  • "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

  • “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

  • "An intimate, moving narrative peppered with harsh statistics, love, angst, and the author’s own admirable vulnerability."

    ―Library Journal (Starred)

  • “[A] high-wire act of writing about privilege and the pain of losing your oldest friend.”

    —Vogue