To Never See Heaven opens with the protagonist, Antony Shrader, agonizing over his decision to write a commencement speech traditionally given by his husband.

This year is different. His lover is dying. In order to bring himself to do this speech, Antony must look back at the pages of his own life that have brought him to fulfill this duty. After all, a commencement is not the end. It is the beginning.

Antony’s story begins as a gay teenager born into privilege. However, Antony’s sensitive nature and unresolved traumas had convinced him that he had lived a past life as a suffering poet. He believed that the inevitable separation from his family and their elitist world was his chance to redeem himself from beyond a world he knew.

Antony could not shake these feelings of his fated doom and loneliness. To escape this void, he would flee to study in Paris, either to rise to the true destiny of his life or to lay down his body where he felt the true origins of his spirit had been conceived. There, Antony would fall in love, but while his heart and mind flourished in Paris, his body and spiritwould succumb to addiction; the demons of his past life came to haunt him.

In the process of trying to outrun himself, his fall into the darkness inevitably brings him to humility and true healing. There, he found what he had needed most—his own love and acceptance.