The Elissas: Three Girls, One Fate, and the Deadly Secrets of Suburbia

by Samantha Leach

While Claire was troubled by the low self-esteem Alissa had, she comforted herself with the knowledge that no woman truly has high self-esteem. Insecurity is the inheritance of womanhood.

Feminist scholar Carol Gilligan argues that in adolescence, girls are encouraged to surrender their own perspectives. They’re supposed to make themselves small, focus on becoming conventionally attractive and traditionally “nice,” forgoing their confidence, spirit, and voice in favor of embodying these feminine mandates.3

Getting Wrecked: Women, Incarceration, and the American Opioid Crisis, she points out the double standard of addiction, claiming that women’s drug use, particularly white women’s, disturbs society much more than men’s. Because women are or have the potential to become mothers, we moralize their drug use. Stoking our culture’s obsession with women as keepers of the domestic realm and our subsequent desire to penalize any woman who deviates from this role.

While being a rebellious teenage girl is an inherently romantic experience—one that’s been fetishized by the stories I grew up on, both in the tabloids I devoured and in the pages of the novels that I sought refuge in—the romance doesn’t last long. There’s a very short window between the time in which society places these girls and their exploits on a pedestal and when they decide their escapades have gone too far, are too much. Turning on them for their refusal to conform to the standards of upper-middle-class white morality. Maligning them, sidelining them, and shaming them. Labeling them as bad, or in the cases of Elissa, Alyssa, and Alissa, troubled.