The Ascent by Allison Buccola—Cults, New Motherhood, and Secrets

I’m absolutely delighted to welcome Allison Buccola to the MissDemeanors. Allison is a fantastic author whose work is sharp, insightful, and deeply affecting. I really enjoyed reading Allison’s new thriller, The Ascent, and I can’t wait to share the details with you.

Allison Buccola is the author of The Ascent and Catch Her When She Falls. She has a JD from the University of Chicago and lives in the Chicago suburbs with her husband and their two young children.

About The Ascent

What would you do if the past showed up on your doorstep?

A woman who grew up in a cult must decide if she can trust the stranger claiming to have answers to the dark mysteries of her childhood in this irresistible thriller.

ONE OF THE CHICAGO REVIEW OF BOOKS’ MOST ANTICIPATED MYSTERIES OF THE YEAR

For decades, the whereabouts of The Fifteen has been an unsolved mystery. All the members of this reclusive commune outside Philadelphia vanished twenty years ago, except for one: a twelve-year-old girl found wandering alone on the side of the road.

In the years since that morning, Lee Burton has tried to put the pain of her past behind her, building a new identity for herself with a doting husband and seven-month-old daughter, Lucy. But motherhood is proving a bigger challenge than she anticipated. She doesn’t want to let Lucy out of her sight even for a moment. She can’t return to work. She’s not sleeping, and she has started spiraling into paranoia.

Then a stranger shows up on her doorstep, offering answers to all of Lee’s questions about her past—if Lee could only trust that this woman is who she says she is. Can Lee keep her safe, stable life? Or will new revelations about “the cult that went missing” shatter everything? In The Ascent, Allison Buccola has crafted a nerve-rattling thriller about motherhood, identity, and the truths we think we know about our families.See Less

Why a cult? You write about the cult with great authority. Did you interview any people who lived in cults? 

I think intentional communities in general are fascinating.  I’m very interested in the decision that some people make to opt out of society and approach the world in a completely different way—whether it’s joining a religious sect or the communes of the sixties and seventies or the modern homesteading movement.  I’ve talked to people involved in those kinds of projects, and I can absolutely see the appeal of some of those lifestyles (even though they are RADICALLY different from my very suburban, Midwestern, two-kids-and-a-dog existence).  I think sometimes those communities can be beneficial, sometimes they can be dysfunctional, and sometimes they can be what we would call a cult.

The difference between an intentional community and a cult is that cult is, by definition, bad.  If we’re calling a group a “cult,” it means that something has gone wrong (or we’re worried that something is going to go wrong).  Things can get very strange very fast when groups are isolated and people are in an echo chamber, even if most of the people involved started out with good intentions.

I did a lot of reading and went down a lot of rabbit holes for research.  I watched documentaries on recent-ish cults (NXIVM, Rajneeshpuram, Heaven’s Gate) and also spent way too much time reading about historical cults like G.I. Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man.  I read manifestos and textbooks on self-sufficient living.  And I read the interviews collected in Stories from Jonestown by Leigh Fondakowski, which helped get into Lee’s head.

In “The Ascent,” you explore how trauma from childhood can resurface during major life transitions like motherhood. What inspired you to connect these two vulnerable states of being?

When I became a mother, I was ready for my life to be very different, but I’m not sure I was prepared for how extreme a transformation it would be. Everything feels so charged in those early days. You have this new, massive responsibility, and everything in your environment seems like a potential threat to this tiny, vulnerable person, and you’re extremely sleep deprived but also hopped up on hormones.  It felt like a total rewiring—my priorities changed drastically, and so did my framework for understanding the world.  I saw my own childhood and my relationship to my parents differently—and in my case, that was a positive experience, but I could see how jarring it could be to look back on a traumatic event or unstable family relationship with that new understanding.

Lee’s paranoia about her daughter’s safety blurs the line between normal new-mother anxiety and trauma response. She seems to be acting out all the relationships of her past in her present—a male/father figure who is not to be trusted, but is to be feared, a child who might vanish at any moment. I think it’s a brilliant connection. Did you think of this ahead of time during planning, or did it surface during the writing? 

Planning and writing are intertwined for me.  I’m jealous of people who can write in an orderly way—planning and then outlining and then executing.  I’m coming to terms with the fact that my process is messy, and I need to do a lot of scene writing/trial-and-error to figure out who my characters are and what they’re up to.  I knew Lee was a cult survivor from the very beginning of the project, but I played around with a few different ideas for her present-day life before finally making her a new mother.  As soon as I started writing her as a new mother, with a child she was afraid of losing, she jumped off the page at me.  I knew it was that parallel between the past and the present that was making it work, but I got there in a messy, uncovering-the-character way, not a top-down planning way.  (Her husband was a little more planned.  He was always meant to be a commanding figure in her new life, but I still had to work out the details.

Cults remain fascinating to readers, yet your novel seems less focused on sensationalism and more on the aftermath of such experiences. What aspects of cult psychology were most important for you to portray accurately?

When I was reading and watching interviews with cult survivors, I kept finding myself drawn to stories about their experience after leaving the group.  Reintegration into society can be very hard—especially for second-generation cult members, who aren’t reintegrating but are instead joining mainstream society for the first time.  There are different norms, different values, and different frameworks you have to learn, so many cult survivors feel like outsiders or struggle to adjust.  Some of the survivors of Jonestown and Heaven’s Gate, the survivors expressed very conflicted feelings—the loss of the group was a real loss.  That was their home, and now it’s gone.  I wanted to capture some of that in this story.  And I also wanted to capture some of the human elements of being part of the group—Lee’s relationship with her family members and the other members of Jacob’s Hill, and the bonds they formed with each other, separate and apart from the cult leader.

Without revealing spoilers, how did you decide on the ultimate fate of the commune members? Were there alternative endings you considered?

I did consider alternative endings.  The Ascent is my second book, so I was able to sell it on proposal—which means instead of submitting a full manuscript for my publisher to consider, I submitted six chapters and a synopsis.  The ending in that synopsis is VERY different from what happens in the book.  But as I was writing and trying to get to the proposed ending, I just couldn’t do it—it didn’t make sense for the characters, and it wasn’t the direction the story wanted or needed to go.  I got to a point about halfway through drafting where I realized “this is what needs to happen” and changed course.

Will you be doing any appearances? Where can readers see/meet you?

I will be!  If you’re in the Chicago area, I will be at Seminary Co-op on Wednesday, May 28.  If you’re in the Philly area, I’ll be at Helen Kate Furness Library on Saturday, May 31.  And I’ll be on a panel at Thrillerfest in New York City on Saturday, June 21!

What’s next?

My next book is still a work in progress, so I don’t want to get into too many details since they could change. But it takes place at a Michigan lake house in the winter, and it involves three sisters who understand their family’s past very differently

Thank you Allison for visiting and the best of luck on your new thriller! Happy Book Birthday!

You can read more about Allison and her books on her site: https://www.allisonbuccola.com

Emilya Naymark

Emilya Naymark is the author of the novels Hide in Place and Behind the Lie.
Her short stories appear in the Bouchercon 2023 Anthology, A Stranger Comes to Town: edited by Michael Koryta, Secrets in the Water, After Midnight: Tales from the Graveyard Shift, River River Journal, Snowbound: Best New England Crime Stories 2017, and 1+30: THE BEST OF MYSTORY.

When not writing, Emilya works as a visual artist and reads massive quantities of psychological thrillers, suspense, and crime fiction. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her family.

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