Roberts Essex: The Savannah Story Behind Chance. Beginnings

The Author Behind the Book

Roberts Essex: The Savannah Story Behind Chance. Beginnings

A former Savannah lawman who became a healer, and a memoir that turns one ordinary Southern life into six decades of faith, family, and second chances.

By Roberts Essex · Memoir · Faith · Savannah, Georgia

In 1968, the songwriter Roger Miller recorded a quiet, tender tune about the birth and boyhood of a child he simply called Vance. Decades later, that little song lodged itself in the heart of a Georgia man and would not let go. He had lived a life that, in his own words, sometimes seemed too strange to be true, yet every word of it was. So he sat down and began to write. The result is Chance. Beginnings, the debut memoir from Roberts Essex, and the opening chapter of a story that spans most of the American twentieth century.

If you have arrived here searching for the author of Chance. Beginnings, or wondering who Roberts Essex is, this is the place to start. What follows is the real shape of his life, the book it became, and why readers who love an honest Southern story keep turning the pages.

Who is Roberts Essex

Roberts Essex is the pen name of a man born on March 30, 1957, and raised in Savannah, Georgia, the city whose squares, river fog, and live oaks run through every page he writes. He came of age in the last great stretch of a slower America: penny candy and banana-seat bicycles, three television channels and the national anthem at sign-off, leaded gasoline and unlocked front doors. He graduated from Savannah High School in 1975 and carried the deep South with him wherever he went next.

His path was anything but straight. Before he ever called himself a writer, he wore a badge, walking a beat in a city he describes as a lot of town to police. Years later, after a season of loss that nearly broke him, he returned to school and rebuilt his life around medicine. He went on to earn advanced clinical training, graduating with honors and devoting decades to family medicine in Georgia. A man who once carried a service revolver spent the back half of his career carrying a stethoscope. That arc, from order to healing, from breaking to mending, is the secret engine of everything he writes.

Today, now in his late sixties, Roberts Essex lives quietly in rural Georgia with his wife of more than thirty years. Between them they count four children, five grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. When he is not writing, you will find him behind a camera, in the garden, on a motorcycle, or somewhere down a back road with no particular place to be.

Roberts Essex at a glance

Pen name

Roberts Essex (author of the Chance memoir series)

Born

March 30, 1957

Hometown

Savannah, Georgia

Earlier life

Law enforcement, then a long career in family medicine

Education

Savannah High School; later honors graduate in clinical medicine

Genres

Memoir, biography, faith based nonfiction

Debut book

Chance. Beginnings (Parker Publishers, 2025)

Lives

Rural Georgia, with his wife of 30+ years

 

 

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The world of Chance. Beginnings

At the center of the book is a boy named Chance Brogdon, a thinly veiled version of the author himself. We meet him at the very start, born into a Savannah on the edge of enormous change. The Cold War hums in the background. Kennedy is on the horizon. Mercury astronauts climb into tiny capsules, and by the end of Chance’s story those capsules have become space shuttles named Columbia and Challenger. The book moves through the presidencies from Kennedy to Carter, through vinyl giving way to eight tracks and cassettes and compact discs, through a south wrestling openly and painfully with the long overdue work of civil rights.

This is not a tidy nostalgia trip. Roberts Essex writes the south he actually lived in: warm and mannered on the surface, tangled and turbulent underneath. The same streets that gave him moon pies and Friday nights also showed him the hard edges of his era. He renders all of it in plain, unhurried prose, the kind of voice that sounds like a grandfather telling you the truth on a front porch, sweet tea sweating in his hand.

Time and events occur around Chance in real time, usually beyond his control, yet his choices shape everything that comes next. From the preface to Chance. Beginnings

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A story of faith, falling, and finding the way back

What lifts Chance. Beginnings above a simple family chronicle is its spine of faith. This is the story of a devoutly Christian man who does not pretend to be a saint. Chance strays. He stumbles into lust and regret and ego. He gets knocked, more than once, all the way down to his knees. And it is there, on his knees, that he discovers exactly where he was meant to be all along.

Watching over him is a presence the author calls Earl, a guardian angel of sorts, woven through the narrative as a reminder that no one walks alone. The result is a memoir that will speak directly to readers who have known failure and longed for grace, who understand that real strength is not in never falling but in rising every single time you do. It is a Christian memoir of redemption that never preaches and never flinches.

The story does not shy from heartbreak. There is a marriage that comes apart, a son held just out of reach, accusations that should never have been spoken, and a father brought to the floor of his own life. How a man holds onto faith when nearly everything else is taken from him is the question that powers the whole book, and the trilogy still to come.

Want to feel the voice for yourself? Read the opening pages of Chance. Beginnings and see why readers cannot put it down.

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Who this memoir is for

If you love Southern memoirs, true stories of faith and redemption, or sweeping portraits of growing up in twentieth century America, Chance. Beginnings belongs on your shelf. Readers who connected with honest, faith centered life stories tend to find a kindred spirit here, as do anyone drawn to Savannah, to the deep south, or to the simple miracle of an ordinary person who refuses to give up.

It is also, quietly, a book about second acts. Roberts Essex lived several lives before he ever wrote one down: son, husband, father, officer, healer. Chance. Beginnings is the first volume of three, the start of a six-decade story that is still being told. The beginning, as the title promises, is only the beginning.

Step into the story

Discover the memoir readers are calling honest, tender, and impossible to forget. Visit the author’s home online to read more, sign up for news on the next book, and get your copy of Chance. Beginnings.

Get the book Visit robertsessex.com

Roberts Essex is the pen name of the author of Chance. Beginnings, published by Parker Publishers, 2025.  ·  robertsessex.com