Eating Dirt

“I wasn’t born on a frosty morn, nor in a good part of town. Baby beggars can’t be choosers. Daybreak strikes me as the choicest moment for starting a lifetime, perhaps plunging down the birth canal into a warm house with electricity and indoor plumbing instead of a converted stable infested with rats and the smell of outdoor privies. My sister Henna, at fourteen my oldest sibling, served as midwife the night of September 6, 1934.” So begins the tale of William Charles Conner as he and his four siblings, deserted by their father, grow up in extreme poverty. The story takes place in rural North Georgia during a time of great strife in the Deep South and is set against the backdrop of post-Great Depression recovery, the great home-front war machine of WWII, and the drive-in craze of the 1950s. As the boy becomes a man, a choice must be made—one that could take him far from the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. With grace, wit, and compassion, Conner offers the reader a glorious and visual record of lives sustained by tenacity, tradition, cunning, and character along with the promises of religion—sometimes realized, frequently denied—all drawn from the memories of a boy who saw too much and chose to remember it all. Conner’s writing seamlessly structures stories with warmth, intimacy and a raw and poignant understanding of the power of the past. Eating Dirt is a wise and redemptive book, a dazzling meditation on innocence, ambition, pleasure, and regret.More about the author: Leveraging GI Bill benefits, the author went on to enroll at Emory at Oxford College. Within three years, he was accepted into Emory University School of Medicine on a full scholarship and graduated with his medical degree in 1962. Dr. Conner began his residency at Emory in the Department of Psychiatry and later served on the faculty. His story continues in the second book of his trilogy, Boy Jumps Over the Moon.