{"id":4962,"date":"2026-06-06T15:31:45","date_gmt":"2026-06-06T19:31:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/?p=4962"},"modified":"2026-06-06T15:31:47","modified_gmt":"2026-06-06T19:31:47","slug":"mark-peress-new-memoir-about-his-father","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/blog\/2026\/06\/06\/mark-peress-new-memoir-about-his-father\/","title":{"rendered":"Mark Peres\u2019s New Memoir about His Father"},"content":{"rendered":"
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With Father\u2019s Day just around the corner, now is a perfect time to showcase Mark Peres\u2019s new memoir about his father. Titled The Man Who Lived a Hundred Lives, <\/em>this memoir not only tells the story of the remarkable life of Mark\u2019s father, but it also touches on Mark\u2019s relationship with his father. I recently contacted Mark and asked him for more information on The Man Who Lived a Hundred Lives <\/em>and how he came to write it.  Here is what he sent to me:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Father’s Day arrives differently at different stages of life.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a child, Father’s Day is about gratitude. As a young adult, it can become an occasion for distance, independence, or even rebellion. But as the years pass, something changes. We begin to see our fathers not merely as parents but as people: complex, imperfect, contradictory people who lived entire lives before we arrived and who carried burdens, dreams, losses, and aspirations that we only partially understood. My memoir, <\/em>The Man Who Lived a Hundred Lives, emerged from that realization.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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The book began with a conversation. In 1992, when my father was in his seventies and I was standing at a crossroads in my own life, I sat down with him in Miami and began asking questions. I thought I knew his story. After all, he was my father. I knew where he had lived, what jobs he had held, and some of the colorful anecdotes that surfaced at family gatherings. But as the interviews unfolded, I discovered how little I knew.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

My father, Ambrosio Benchimol Peres, had lived one improbable life after another. He grew up in a Jewish community deep in the Amazon rainforest of Brazil. He was an early voice on the radio, a revolutionary, a law student, an AWOL soldier in the Brazilian Army. He sold lingerie in Havana before the Cuban Revolution. He migrated to the United States and took on odd jobs. He traveled the world, created wealth, and lost it all. He moved our family repeatedly, always chasing opportunity and imagining a better future just over the horizon. Over the course of his life, he seemed to become several different people, each adapted to a different place and time.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I still remember the yellow legal pads on the table and the tape recorder between us. Occasionally my father would pause, stare into the distance, and retrieve a memory that had lain dormant for decades. In those moments, I felt less like a son and more like a passenger carried to places and times I had never known.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The title of the memoir came naturally. My father did not simply live a long life. He lived many lives. Yet the deeper I listened, the more I realized that the story was not only about adventure or resilience. It was about identity. It was about what we inherit from our parents and what remains hidden from us. It was about the mysteries that exist even within the families we believe we know best.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The interviews sat in boxes and folders for decades. Like many people, I was busy building a career, raising a family, and pursuing other ambitions. The recordings and transcripts became part of the background of my life: important, cherished, but unfinished.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Years later, after my father’s death, I returned to them. By then, the urgency felt different. I was no longer simply collecting family history. I was trying to preserve a voice before it disappeared. I was trying to understand the arc of a life that stretched across continents and generations. I was trying to answer a question that many sons eventually confront: Who was my father when he wasn’t my father? The answer turned out to be richer and far more surprising than I could have imagined.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Charlotte played an important role in bringing that story into the world. For more than two decades, Charlotte has been my adopted hometown. It is where I have taught, raised a family, built friendships, and helped create organizations devoted to conversation, ideas, and civic life. The memoir found its final form through the encouragement of Charlotte’s literary community.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the most important influences was the Charlotte Lit Author’s Lab. Writing is often described as a solitary act, but books rarely emerge from solitude alone. They require readers, teachers, editors, and fellow travelers who help us see what is working and what is not. The Author’s Lab provided exactly that kind of community. Over many months, I shared pages, received feedback, wrestled with structure, and learned how to transform recorded interviews and memories into a narrative that readers could experience as a page-turning story.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The process taught me something unexpected. Memory preserves facts, but storytelling reveals meaning. Perhaps that is why Father’s Day feels so connected to this book. For many of us, the day on the calendar is not merely a celebration of a parent. It is an invitation to remember. To ask questions. To listen more carefully. To recognize that the people who raised us contain entire worlds that we may never fully know.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Writing the book allowed me to spend one more season in conversation with my father. It allowed me to see him not simply as the man who raised me but as a fellow traveler navigating uncertainty, reinvention, love, disappointment, hope, and time.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the end, that may be what every family story is about. We begin by trying to understand our parents. Along the way, we discover that we are also trying to understand ourselves.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

For readers who want to know more about Mark and his writings, please click on the following link:  https:\/\/www.markperes.com\/<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I congratulate Mark on his new memoir, and I thank him for sharing the story behind the writing of this memoir.\u00a0 I also thank him for his many contributions to our community from founding the online magazine Charlotte Viewpoint <\/em>(which ran from 2003 to 2016),to leading the Charlotte Center for the Humanities & Civic Imagination, to writing the speculative fiction novel The Accord. <\/em>With the publication of The Man Who Lived a Hundred Lives, <\/em>Mark is now also part of Storied Charlotte’s ever-widening circle of memoirists. \u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

With Father\u2019s Day just around the corner, now is a perfect time to showcase Mark Peres\u2019s new memoir about his father. Titled The Man Who Lived a Hundred Lives, this memoir not only tells the story of the remarkable life of Mark\u2019s father, but it also touches on Mark\u2019s relationship with his father. I recently […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[359,146],"class_list":["post-4962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-storied-charlotte","tag-mark-peres","tag-memoir"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4962"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4962\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4972,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4962\/revisions\/4972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pages.charlotte.edu\/mark-west\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}