Recently, I listened to David Sedaris read his essay, “Punching Down” on Bari Weiss’s podcast. In it, he describes how his parents hit him and his five siblings. “Who knew my mother could move so fast,” he writes, “like someone belted in the martial arts…[a]nd look at us! We’re fine.”
Immediately, I thought, “Didn’t David Sedaris have a sister who committed suicide, and didn’t their parents send her to Élan School?” A sibling who committed suicide would suggest that they did not, in fact, turn out fine. Moreover, shipping your kid off to a place like Élan is not a shining achievement for any parent.
“Punching Down” makes no mention of Tiffany Sedaris at all, but he did write about her for the New Yorker in 2013 in an essay titled “Now We Are Five.” In it, he describes a woman who was difficult to get along with, who likely had some kind of mental illness, who would “throw a dish at you and the next [day] she’d create a stunning mosaic made of the shards.”
He noted that her 9th-grade yearbook was full of messages from friends inviting her to get drunk or stoned and that she ran away soon after:
“A few weeks after these messages were written, Tiffany ran away, and was subsequently sent to a disciplinary institution in Maine called Élan. According to what she told us later, it was a horrible place. She returned home in 1980, having spent two years there, and from that point on none of us can recall a conversation in which she did not mention it.”
For anyone who knows anything about the Troubled Teen Industry, of which Élan School was a part, this comes across as stunningly clueless. Élan was a hell of a lot worse than “horrible,” and when you learn about what went on at Élan, you won’t be surprised that she never stopped talking about it.
In saying so little about Élan in “Now We Are Five” and failing to mention Tiffany at all in “Punching Down,” Sedaris is leaving out the most fascinating and shocking part of the story.
Abuse allegations against the Élan School, in Poland, Maine, go as far back as 1975. On July 30, 1975, the Daily Illini recorded Élan founder Joe Ricci saying, “I believe we’ve been slandered, libeled, and that this is a political hoax.” At the time the Associated Press reported that the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services had removed 11 children from Élan because they had been mentally and physically abused there.
A 1983 documentary, Children of Darkness, recorded rare footage of “attack therapy.” Pioneered by the violent mid-century Synanon cult, attack therapy is a pseudo-therapeutic practice that includes “highly confrontational interaction between the patient and a therapist, or between the patient and fellow patients during group therapy, in which the patient may be verbally abused, denounced, or humiliated by the therapist or other members of the group.” In other words, people sit in a circle and scream insults at each other.
Attack therapy went on during Élan’s “encounter groups.” Kids sat in a circle and took turns screaming at each other. If you were the target of the screaming, you weren’t allowed to react. If you reacted, you got a general meeting.
At Élan, if you talked back or made some other minor infraction, the group leader could single you out for a “general meeting.” A cluster of teens would crowd around you and scream invectives at you at the tops of their lungs for up to seven minutes. Then, it would be another teen’s turn to hurl vitriol at you. The teens had no choice, no option to sit this one out; it was scream or be screamed at. Refusing to participate in a general meeting meant being the target of the next general meeting.
Sedaris seems annoyed that his sister never stopped bringing up her time at Élan; what he doesn’t seem to realize is that she probably never stopped hearing this in her head.
Children of Darkness also documented what Élan did with runaways, noting that trackers would comb through the woods to catch kids who’d tried to make a break for it. and showed two teenage boys living in a Dumpster outside the facility. For refusing to participate in the program, Élan forced them to live in garbage while another boy guarded them.
“If they escape, he’ll be put inside,” the narrator says.
Another boy who tried to run away appears dressed as a pink bunny with shackles around his ankles. The filmmakers weren’t supposed to capture any of this, but their defiance of Élan’s restrictions means we have a vital record of the abuses that went on there.
An Élan School survivor told the Sun Journal that he witnessed a girl with spinal curvature forced to belly-crawl across the floor while the other students screamed at her, and then, “students tied together a crown of tampons dipped in ketchup and made her wear the thing on her head.”
(Author’s note: nowhere does human creativity flourish more than in the invention of new and bizarre punishments.)
But perhaps worst of all, Élan was notorious for something called The Ring. Students who tried to run away or committed other offenses had to step into The Ring, which is exactly what it sounds like: the offender had to box other students, while others watched. Each round, a fresh fighter would step in, and the offender, who would be increasingly tired and injured as the fight went on, would have to square up with someone who had yet to break a sweat.
In 1982, a student named Phil Williams died after taking part in The Ring. For talking back to staff, he received a beating so savage it caused a brain aneurysm. While the case was cold for decades, Maine State Police re-opened the investigation in 2016 but ultimately couldn’t find enough evidence for charges. However, given the number of deaths that have occurred in facilities like Élan, a dearth of evidence doesn’t mean Élan is innocent.
Abuse allegations continued until 2011 when Élan finally closed down.
So why does Sedaris spend more time describing the seashell print on couch cushions in “Now We Are Five” than he does actually talking about Élan?
Only he knows, but I suppose it’s because he’s a humorist and there just isn’t anything funny about Élan or about the Trouble Teen Industry in general. Secondly, the Upper West Side chardonnay sippers who page through the New Yorker while sitting in their gilded age window seats probably don’t want gory details about tampon crowns and bunny suits; “horrible” will suffice as a description, thank you very much.
As a writer, I can forgive Sedaris for his artistic choices. But as a human, I wish he’d consider what it would have been like to spend two years of his life in rundown lodges with constant surveillance, daily screaming, humiliation and the ever-present threat of physical violence that, unlike his mother’s slaps as he describes them in “Punching Down,” drew a great deal of blood.
And then I wish he’d realize that, unlike Tiffany, he was very lucky.
For further reading on the Troubled Teen Industry, check out Help at Any Cost by Maia Szalavitz. You may also want to check out my novel, Tough Love at Mystic Bay.
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