You could say that Bustle editor Samantha Leach started writing The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia (Legacy Lit) shortly after her best friend from childhood, Elissa, died suddenly at the age of eighteen. Leach was grieving, of course, and she wanted to understand how their lives, once parallel—growing up together in the suburbs of Providence, attending temple, addicted to The Simple Life, and acting out in innocent ways—had so sharply diverged. In middle school, Elissa had been kicked out of their private school and was eventually sent to Ponca Pines, a therapeutic boarding school in Nebraska, part of the Troubled Teen Industry, “a network of private, unregulated residential programs that some fifty thousand teens will attend each year in their parents’ hopes it will quell their bad behavior,” Leach writes.
But when two of Elissa’s friends from Ponca Pines, their names eerily similar to hers—Alyssa and Alissa—also died young, Leach felt a need to write about the three women and to answer the question: “Why are these girls no longer here? Why am I the one left telling this story?” as she writes in The Elissas.
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. I was delighted to speak with Leach over the phone about balancing scene with research and commentary and balancing the desire to deconstruct harmful narratives about the ways women should look and be with the desire to be thin and hairless.
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The Rumpus: In the author’s note, you talk about how you first started writing about Elissa shortly after her death in 2011. Can you talk about how the project has evolved since those early attempts and what it took, personally or otherwise, to finally undertake the project seriously?
Samantha Leach: It goes back to being in those small liberal arts college workshops where I was writing a lot. I have this little chapbook thing we made in “Intro to Creative Writing.” It was really cute, we folded the paper origami-style. It was this little zine-type thing. I called it Wild Horses after the Rolling Stones song, which was initially supposed to be the epigraph to my book, but I couldn’t get the rights for like, less than $10,000 for like two lines, so it’s no longer that. Now it’s “Hell is a teenage girl” from Jennifer’s Body.
Rumpus: Oh, I have not seen that.
Leach: It’s a Megan Fox cult classic. So anyways Wild Horses the zine, it really had a lot of the same themes or ideas that would later evolve into this. It was just a collection of vignettes about our friendship, some of the early memories, last times we’d seen each other, ruminations on my really early grief. Sophomore year, I took a course called “Anthropology and Media” where we had to do an ethnography on a piece of social media, and I did an ethnography on Elissa’s Facebook page. I went really deep into studying it—who are the people posting, compiling, and pulling together all these posts—and interviewing people about it. So while the Facebook aspect of it had long been a fascination of mine, I turned an academic lens to it my sophomore year.
Throughout college, only my Elissa had died, so senior year I wrote a really bad creative writing story about one young girl who’s obsessed with Facebook memorial pages and an older woman who’s obsessed with going to funerals of people she didn’t know. I was trying to do bad Otessa Moshfegh cosplay. I was writing her sentences and kept inserting all these motifs of birds. So I put it down for a long time after college, and then I took a writing workshop with Rachel Syme when I first moved to New York, and I wrote about Facebook and grief and my friendship. It was always through the lens of Facebook, the early entry points, but she was like, “It sounds like this should just be a story about your friend.”
And there’s no properly delicate way to say this, but it wasn’t until the third Alissa had passed away that there felt any sort of, not urgency, I don’t think that’s the word, but this is the moment. I don’t think I woke up one day and was like, “I’m going to write a book.” It was more like, “I can’t believe these three women are gone.” And it became not something I wanted to do but something I needed to do to make sense of what had happened.
The passing of the other two Elissas and reckoning with that also coincided with reading Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women—
Rumpus: I’m so glad you brought her up because I was going to bring her up.
Leach: That was one of those watershed moments where I was like, “Oh I can do this because she did.” The structure of this book wouldn’t exist with Lisa. I’m so in Lisa’s debt. She has been very kind to me and took my calls, gave me advice, which was unbelievable of her because I have so much hero worship of her. [Three Women] gave me permission by way of seeing the structure.
Rumpus: I was going to say when I heard about your book and later when I began reading it, I couldn’t help but think of Three Women. I was curious about the ways that book informed your approach to The Elissas.
Leach: Other than the structure itself, I think what I really loved and was inspired by about Taddeo’s work was the way that she distilled the women’s lives to one theme. Something that my editor and I talked about was that the background was the Troubled Teen Industry, suburbia, all these places, but what it felt like they were telling the story of to me, and what I could relate to, was rebellion. If I could trace their lives through that lens—of where rebellion starts, what it coalesces into, why women choose to go that way, what the pressures are—all of that. What sex was to Taddeo, rebellion was to me.
Rumpus: A big difference I noticed between Three Women and The Elissas was that Three Women stays focused on the individual narratives of Maggie, Sloan, and Lina. Your book often zooms out and shows how the Elissas fit into larger narratives—whether it be the way young women struggle with their body image, the Troubled Teen Industry, or the opioid epidemic. Can you talk about your choice to include this wider lens?
Leach: A lot of it was at the influence of my editor, who I think was really smart to do that. Krishan Trotman is her name; she edited Stephanie Land’s Maid. She’s really interested in world issues. She does an interesting sweet spot of commercial nonfiction with real messaging. And I think at first, I was so obsessed with getting the story right and learning their lives, and when I came to her with my outline, it was really narrative-driven, particularly because I was so influenced by reading Three Women. And she’s like, “This is great, but this is the outline we’re going to rework. Pick four themes and each scene you have to tell me how they tie back to these four themes and what new things we’re going to illuminate about these themes via these scenes.” And I was like, “This is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. How am I going to do this?” I was terrified. And as I was doing it, it clicked into place.
A lot of these things I felt really deeply in my bones already, but some of the greatest joy of this book was doing the research and learning more about these topics and reading other writers who came before me, like Caroline Knapp. Or Leslie Jamison’s famous essay on pain. Clicking on every single thing that was linked in there and every person and tracing it down.
Rumpus: What I’m hearing you say is that some of that research and reportage wasn’t originally a part of your conception, but your editor pushed you in that direction.
Leach: I think what I would say is that she was the inspiration to go wider, and I very quickly was happy to move in that direction. The book, when I sold it, was a pitch. It wasn’t written, so it was very much an evolution and an ongoing discussion of what it would look like. We were very in the weeds together.
Rumpus: I had assumed because you work as a journalist, that was coming from your experience doing so much reporting.
Leach: I was always really interested in doing more reporting on the Troubled Teen Industry. The references to pop culture and girlhood-y pop culture is just the language that I speak, so that was always going to be there, but she definitely pushed me in a more sociological direction that I feel really benefitted the book and that I’m really grateful for.
Rumpus: I’m curious to hear more about your research and reporting process. Other than interviewing those who were close to the Elissas, what was involved in your research and reporting process? You often quote from other works of nonfiction, such as Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy. How and when did you decide to do that?
Leach: I just was reading constantly, and I felt as if every book I read led to the next one. What I just said about “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain”—any citation I was just like, “Then I’ll read that, and then I’ll read that.” I don’t remember at this point what I started with, just [that] everything fed into the next one. In terms of incorporating them in the individual quotes themselves, it just was the things that rose about the fray where I was just like, “I’m not going to paraphrase this. This is perfect and this is the exact thought. My reader needs to know this.” It was an element of wanting to give credit where credit was due but also this is a perfect quote that needs to exist. I wish I could say this is when I do this or this is when I do that. It was very me sitting there on the page and just trusting my gut. It’s hard to think of it in a very deliberate way. It always felt very organic.
I think I had a doc that was called, “Authors Who Inspire Me.” It was just their names bolded and their quotes and my musings on them. It was almost like I was writing mini research papers all the time about all these people who I really admired, and then I would have it up in my tabs and then I could steal from this document that I was just taking notes on and always adding to. Puzzle-piecing is the only way I can think to put it.
Rumpus: We’ve talked about the allusions to these other big nonfiction books, but the other allusions that stood out to me that you mentioned are all the TV pop culture references, to The Simple Life, Euphoria, The OC. You were talking about how that’s the language that you speak. I’m curious how pop culture has informed you and your writing and secondarily how you think those narratives—particularly “the glamorous portrayals of poor little rich girls” you mention in The Elissas—shaped Elissa?
Leach: To me, I don’t exist without pop culture. It’s quite literally the air I breathe, it’s what I do for a living. It’s what informed this book. I can speak to Elissa and me when I talk about being really obsessed with Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie. We looked to them as who we should be. I was the Nicole to her Paris. And it was personality and identities that we could slot ourselves into.
There was just something about Elissa that was bolder. She was so much more external than I was, and I think that was really what slotted her into the Paris and me into the Nicole. There was a willingness to go there more so. She was the catalyst. Seeing these women like Paris and Kim, I talk about their sex tapes as these bold actions that felt like shortcuts to fame. There was a daringness, a willingness to do these things to get the attention that made her part of their ilk, whereas my fascination but lack of boldness made me a little bit more of an observer and the best friend role.
Rumpus: Something I see your book trying to do is dismantle some of these narratives, that being beautiful is the key to happiness, or getting a man being the key to happiness. What are some works of art—books, TV, film—that, like your book, you see as trying to dismantle some of these harmful narratives and present something different?
Leach: I struggle with “something different” because I think it’s culture that needs to change and not girls themselves, and I don’t pretend to have the answers. Looks are currency. I was talking to a friend the other day who is a wonderful editor and writer who has long suffered from an eating disorder and writes a lot about that and parenting, and she was talking about when parents think the world will be easier for their child if they’re thinner, they’re not wrong.
So while I can’t point to books that I think offer a solution to these things, I can certainly point to other ones that helped me identify and learn more about and deconstruct more than dismantle. There are elements that I really loved of Emily Ratajkowski’s My Body. She wrote this part in her book where she said she used to go to bed praying to be beautiful because that’s what her mother also prized the most in the world. I read a lot of Lisa Damour, which is not literary, but she is an adolescent psychologist and what I really like about her writing is that it wasn’t alarmist. It taught you a lot of warning signs versus what is just normal. I referenced Caroline Knapp, and Appetites really gave me the blueprint for thinking about coping mechanisms and, in terms of deconstruct[ion], why things like cutting or alcoholism or eating sugars can feel like very feminine urges. You talked about Female Chauvinist Pigs, that was also something that really framed a lot for me.
I read about girlhood through a lot of different eras—oh, Melissa Febos’s Girlhood was huge for me as well, I love that book—but Allie Rowbottom’s Aesthetica really helped me think about that more for particularly the contemporary moment and the internet age.
Rumpus: These books seem like books that millennial women like us need to read to cope with undoing these narratives that we’ve already internalized. But say we have daughters, what do we hand them instead of A Simple Life or instead of The OC?
Leach: I know, I think about that too. I’m not alarmist. To me, yes they brought about toxicity, but I also think they are foundational texts for me, so I still think I’m going to give them to my children.
Rumpus: Maybe just offering more context?
Leach: Context, discussion, my thoughts. Like being honest about how it made me feel about my body or identity or otherwise. I’m down for everything but presented with the right framework and also room for discussion.
Rumpus: As I was reading your essay about your beautiful mom, I was thinking, “Do I really want to be doing all those things and teaching my daughter that she should do these things too? Maybe I should skip having kids, so I don’t brainwash somebody in this way?”
Leach: I’m venting about it in The Cut, but I also just got a Groupon for six sessions of laser hair removal. So, I am the prob—but we’re not the problem, culture is the problem? I know these things are wrong, but also, I kind of want to be hairless.
Rumpus: Yes!
Leach: Those two things can exist at once and that doesn’t make me a bad feminist, not that I believe.
Rumpus: It’s very hard. We started the interview talking about your early attempts at writing about Elissa and how the project evolved over time. But I’m curious on a more personal level how you see yourself as changing over that period of time. What kinds of personal growth you had to undergo to write this? I really related to your dynamic with Elissa—always needing to be the helper, addicted to busying yourself with other people’s problems. I wonder how you fit your journey with Al-Anon into writing this book?
Leach: I would say this book was really instrumental in making connections that I hadn’t made before, [like] the desire to take care of people. Obviously, it’s not always self-centered, but there’s something I get out of it other than just altruism. I never knew if it was the chicken or the egg. Was it Elissa, or was it predisposition? The book was a lot of identifying things. Al-Anon was a really helpful tool in realizing—you know I had been in therapy my whole childhood and after college too—I had never done something in a group setting before, and I think because writing was such an insular experience, having a forum to go and be like, “I want to throw myself in front of the line of fire because it makes me feel better because that’s my power—being able to handle the tough conservation.” It gave me a lot of feeling less alone whereas when you’re writing a book you can feel very alone.
So the book was a lot of identifying, and then when it finally was done it felt like I could breathe and then begin to really unpack what had come to the surface. Now I’ve been really actively in therapy again. I think the book was what readied me to try to make some actual change in my life.
Rumpus: That’s interesting because you often hear that you need to go to therapy to write your book.
Leach: Oh, that’s funny. It’s funny that you should go to therapy before the book, but my book led me to therapy. My first day of therapy—no, beforehand, the welcome session— I asked my new therapist, “Would you want to read my book?” And she was like, “Do you want me to?” And I was like, “Actually, yes.” And she was like, “Well, thank you for telling me this. I will.”
Rumpus: How did she respond to it?
Leach: Oh, she’s been great.
Rumpus: Is she charging you for the hours that it took her to read the book?
Leach: She should be, she hasn’t. Don’t give her that idea.
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Author photo by Emily Knecht
