About The Author
Roberts Essex
Savannah author, speaker, and survivor of childhood trauma. Physician assistant. Debut novelist at sixty something.
Roberts Essex grew up in East Savannah and lived there for thirty-five years. He calls his old neighborhood, a little place called Aendale, his Mayberry. The barber on the corner gave him a penny for a piece of grape bubble gum at the store down the road. His mother named him before the doctor could finish telling her not to. That childhood is the soil the rest of his life grew out of.
He has spent the last four decades working. Police officer in his twenties. Paramedic. Radio. Now a practicing physician assistant. He has written professionally in medical journals for years. None of that was supposed to lead to a book.
His path to the page was not a straight one.
"My twelfth grade English teacher used to have the class stand up and applaud because I showed up. But yet when I got back into college, I ended up being an English honors major."
"If you want to evoke change, you have to make it."
A Different Savannah
- Roberts names his influences directly. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt. Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance. Kingdoms of Savannah by George Dawes Green. He has said he wanted to write a different Savannah than those books captured. Not the murder version. Not the high society version. The simple life version. The version where a boy walks down the corner for a penny. The version where most of us actually grew up. He calls his debut a memoir with the flavor of Walden and Grisham and a palette somewhere between Spielberg and Disney. Readers who have finished it tend to agree.
The Mother at the Center of It
Every page of Chance Beginnings runs through his mother. A young woman who refused to listen when a doctor told her to prepare for the worst. A Southern mother whose faith was the only thing larger than the trouble around her. The kind of woman who held a household together with very little and gave her son the moral compass he is still using.
"Because of my mom, I strive to be the best version of myself every day. Her example will forever be the blueprint for how I want to live."
A Faith That Works
- Roberts treats faith the way a working man treats a tool. Something you pick up when you need it. Something you put down when you cannot carry it. Something that gets you through specific moments. He has said in interviews that faith is more than belief in God or what you learn from the Bible. Faith is your ability to interpret all of that and put it to use while you are growing up, living, and learning how to survive. That definition shapes the whole book.
What Comes Next
Chance Beginnings is the first volume of three. The Search picks up where book one leaves off and follows the protagonist into the harder years that follow. A New Life closes the trilogy.
Roberts is currently on a podcast tour. He has been featured on regional Southern television and is scheduled as a guest on The Your Happy Hour Podcast through The Stack Series, syndicated across Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and YouTube Podcasts. The USA Today press release on Chance Beginnings reaching on the Amazon ebook bestseller list is linked in Press and Recognition.