The Elissas: Crimoir and compromise
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
Broadly, the Troubled Teen Industry – unregulated at best, fraudulent and abusive at worst. Specifically, the untimely death of author Samantha Leach's childhood friend, Elissa, a survivor of Troubled Teen facilities, and the equally premature deaths of two of Elissa's similarly named program friends, Alissa and Alyssa.
The story
There's a tag at my bookshop for "crimoirs" – like true crime itself, a wide-ranging descriptor, covering various sub-subgenres: "my life on patrol in Major Metropolis"; journeys to healing after sexual assault; web-sleuthing art heists and catfishers; and the mourning of – and attempt to contextualize – a friend's violent death. The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia, admiringly reviewed when it came out last year, falls into the latter micro-category.
There, the book joins Carolyn Murnick's The Hot One, Melanie Thernstrom's The Dead Girl, and Sarah Gerard's Carrie Carolyn Coco as sometimes lyrical, usually furious efforts to manage a traumatic loss by particularizing the answers to "Why did this happen?" The larger, real questions, like "Why did this happen to her," "Why was she taken from me," what could have been done to stop it, how the universe allowed it, well, no satisfying answers to those questions exist. More to the point, books pitched around them don't get sold. A woman's non-romantic, non-caretaker grief is not enough. You need a murder to hang it on, or at least a tort.
This is my issue with The Elissas, which is by turns very good – grabby and evocative of Girl World; expert at grounding remembrances with pop-culture detail; pace-y, seeming to pick up both speed and nightmarish foreboding – and very clumsy. I don't blame Leach for this, although she and/or her editor should have caught a handful of distracting locutions (someone "diverting" their eyes), and found a different way to incorporate footnotes and references to…well, just about anything.
When the narrative is about the Elissae, their adolescences, their spiralling into co-dependent relationships with boys or acting out in response to parents' divorces, it's dimensioned and animated. But when it's time to meet the brief with some stats on tough-love boarding schools, disordered eating, or rates of teenage opioid addiction, the writing plants its feet to declaim the information before returning to the story's true center.
It's not that there isn't a throughline here with the Troubled Teen industrial complex, or Oxy, or the cultural influence of the "poor little rich girl" on the Elissae and on Leach herself; it's not that switching between the two tracks is impossible, or that, given another couple of drafts to rethink the structure, Leach isn't capable of it. My issue isn't with Leach, God knows. I had similar reactions to The Hot One and to Carrie Carolyn, a similar sense that, in order to "get to" write their grief, to fill in the space left by an absent friend, the authors had to fasten it to a crime story, and can't quite disguise their ambivalence about that in their prose.
There's a moment in The Elissas (which I failed to bookmark; sorry!) where Leach talks about someone else dismissing an Elissa's behavior as "just attention-seeking," and stops to wonder about the word "just" – the idea that a girl or woman seeking attention is pathological in some way, that the attention sought is not by definition deserved. I kept coming back to that moment after finishing the book, because the book, the real book, is "just" sadness. Longing. Leach couldn't "just" write the book about the covered mirrors in her heart, because there's "just" no space for that in the economics of publishing. - SDB