Front cover of Confessions to the Empty Chair by Anthony Adoré

Confessions to the Empty Chair

A Memoir of Heaven, Hell, and Eden · 2026

Some truths refuse to stay buried. A raw Catholic memoir of faith, desire, and spiritual warfare, Confessions to the Empty Chair follows a boy marked by an unseen war into manhood — through obsession, seduction, sacrament, and the stubborn nearness of God. Anthony Adoré writes from inside the fight, refusing both easy piety and despair, asking what remains of a soul after love, sin, and grace have each taken their turn.

By

The Two Musics

The book opens with an old story: two songs playing at the same time. One is deep and wide and beautiful, but slow, and full of sorrow — and that sorrow is exactly where its beauty comes from. The other is loud and proud, a few notes hammered over and over, trying to drown the first one out. Anthony Adoré grew up hearing both at once. This is the story of learning to tell them apart.

That image belongs to J.R.R. Tolkien. In the Ainulindalë — the creation-hymn that opens The Silmarillion — the world is sung into being by a choir of voices, until one singer breaks from the theme to raise a discord Tolkien calls “loud, and vain, and endlessly repeated.” And yet not one note of that rebellion can sound except as part of the greater Music it meant to drown. Confessions to the Empty Chair is written from inside those two songs at once — learning, slowly, which one to follow.

He doesn’t write about faith from a safe distance. He writes it the way you actually live it — in your body, in the pit of your stomach before a hard day, in an ache that won’t quite name itself, in the strange quiet after something breaks. He stays close to what a moment really felt like: the cold of a school hallway, the weight of shame, the sudden warmth when pain simply lifts and you can’t explain why.

And he won’t take either easy way out. He won’t pretend everything is fine, and he won’t give up and call it all darkness. He stays in the harder middle, where wanting something badly and trying to be good pull against each other at the same time — and he keeps listening for that first, deeper song, the beautiful one with the sorrow in it, playing quietly under all the noise.

What This Book Explores

Faith & Spiritual Warfare

The unseen war a boy is marked by, and the God who stays near it.

Desire & the Body

Wanting, longing, and the body as the place where the soul is tested.

Grief & the Nearness of God

Loss carried not as a problem to fix but as a place God is found within.

Shame & Grace

What a life looks like after love and mistakes have each had their turn.

Exile & Return

The long way out and the longer way home, told without an easy arrival.

Confession as Witness

A story told loud toward an empty chair until the chair answers back.

The Chapters

Eighteen movements, from the mark of childhood to the soul’s ascent — the shape of the book, without giving away its turns.

Two songs are playing at once before the seat of Ilúvatar — one deep and sorrowful and true, one loud and proud and hollow. The book’s overture, and its first lesson in how to listen.

West Texas, age three: a wound is opened that the whole book keeps circling back to — the first thinning of the veil between the seen world and the unseen one. Childhood arrives already braided with grief that comes too early and a first small heartbreak: the earliest “grinding of a blemished lens.”

The gifted magnet school, where class and cruelty “wear the same pastel uniforms.” He carries his spiritual wounds into a new arena and starts keeping an invisible ledger of every betrayal and mercy — learning to watch long before he learns to belong.

“A marketplace of tribes, trombones, and beige computers.” He chooses band over the locker room and invisibility over belonging, studying from the margins how groups form and how desire gets built.

His first direct experience of the divine, breaking into a body already marked. The encounter heals and unsettles at once: instead of tidying the past, a nearness brands him with a hunger it then refuses to satisfy.

Age fourteen, the weight of armor. He tries to serve two masters — a calling and an appetite — wearing his isolation like plate mail even as its weight crushes what it was meant to protect. Pride in his own solitude becomes its own cell.

First love arrives “like a ghost,” slipping through the wall he had built around his heart. Tenderness and vocation begin to pull in opposite directions, and a decision waits at the end of it that will shape everything after.

A Catholic university in Dallas, where a West Texas, “football-shaped” confidence collapses against doctoral-level rigor and classmates fluent in ancient tongues. From that demolition a fiercer, humbler intellect starts to build.

A betrayal that feels less like a wound than a structural fault — and the cold instrument he forges to survive it. Grief gets ritualized into a system, a first attempt to turn pain into something he can control.

He carries his emptiness to Rome for a semester abroad, chasing old shrines across Europe while side-eyeing a commercialized God back home. The managed pilgrimage turns into a second, deeper, stranger encounter with grace.

From Rome’s marble back to a cramped triple dorm room: crude brotherhood, humming appliances, flexible morality, and an invitation behind a locked door that tests every boundary he swore to keep.

Still marked, he tests the reach of his own power while reading the kings of Scripture “for loopholes” — wrestling with a God who leaves his hunger in place and yet keeps calling him further in.

He meets his intellectual match, a rival whose mind mirrors his own, and the sparring turns into something neither of them quite governs. A chapter about being truly seen by an equal — and the cost of a game played too well.

Senior year narrows to a shabby one-bedroom where a woman keeps her body in his bed but won’t leave so much as a toothbrush. Missing belongings and colder theory testify to one verdict he doesn’t want: some loves were never built to stay.

At a professor’s gathering a door quietly opens — an “uninvited grace” he fails to walk through, staying loyal instead to a ghost. Then he leaves the city for good, turns back toward home, and first lays eyes on the woman the rest of his life will bend around.

He tests a person’s capacity for his darkness with calculated confessions, certain his honesty is a weapon that always drives people off. Instead, for once, someone picks the lantern up and keeps walking beside him.

The synthesis: a soul worked like steel between divine heat and cold descent — drawn upward for consolation, driven downward for mission. Childhood mark, adult loves, and scriptural tensions are folded into a single deliberate forging.

The empty chair, and the question of who is meant to sit in it. The book closes by turning its whole argument gently toward the reader.

Book details

  • Author: Anthony Adoré
  • Genre: Memoir · Christian / Catholic spirituality
  • Published: 2026
  • Language: English
  • Pages: 524
  • Paperback ISBN-13: 9798317827328
  • eBook ISBN-13: 9798317827335

Where to find it

Read the reflections drawn from this book: Confessions to the Empty Chair →  ·  Its companion volume: Fractions of the Soul →