Meet the Character: Marissa from Summer Love Autumn Goodbye

It’s been a long time since I’ve done a Meet the Character post, and I decided it was time to bring them back.

This time, though, I want to do a little more than give you a few facts about a character and move on. Every other week, I’m going to introduce someone from one of my books, talk a little about who they are, where their story begins, and—because apparently I have a hard time letting my characters go—where else you might find them.

And there really isn’t anyone better to start with than Marissa.

She is, after all, the girl who started everything.

Before Everything Changed

When readers first meet Marissa in Summer Love Autumn Goodbye, she’s a young teenager who is used to being the responsible one.

She gets good grades. She plays sports. She helps take care of her younger sister. She generally follows the rules and does what she’s supposed to do.

But every summer, Marissa gets to leave home and spend time with her grandparents, who live more than 200 miles away.

Those summers give her something she doesn’t normally have: freedom.

Not complete freedom—she’s still a kid with grandparents who expect her to follow the rules—but enough that she gets to step outside her normal life for a while. She can spend time with her cousins, meet different people, and experience life without all of the expectations she carries at home.

And then she meets Chad.

Then There Was Chad

Chad is her cousin’s best friend.

He’s older. He’s recently been released from juvenile detention. He’s trying to finish school while raising an infant son.

Basically, he’s complicated.

And Marissa falls for him anyway.

What starts during one summer becomes something much bigger than either of them probably expects. Suddenly Marissa isn’t just dealing with a summer crush. She’s navigating first love, an age difference, distance, family expectations, and circumstances that are far more complicated than anything she’s dealt with before.

One of the things I like about Marissa is that she isn’t always particularly good at recognizing when she’s in over her head.

She’s responsible, and because she’s responsible, she sometimes believes that means she’s mature enough to handle situations she really isn’t prepared for.

She’s stubborn.

She’s naive sometimes.

She makes mistakes.

She loves deeply.

And she learns that loving someone doesn’t automatically make everything else easy.

She’s a teenager.

I think sometimes when we look back at teenage characters as adults, it’s easy to wonder why they didn’t make the obvious decision or why they didn’t recognize something that seems incredibly clear to us.

But teenagers don’t have the benefit of looking back.

They’re living it for the first time.

So is Marissa.

Marissa Isn’t Me

This is probably an important distinction to make because of how personal Summer Love Autumn Goodbye is to me.

Marissa is not me.

Chad, however, was a very real person.

He was my first love, and losing him to suicide when I was young had an enormous impact on my life. Years later, those experiences and emotions became part of what inspired Summer Love Autumn Goodbye.

That means there are pieces of real emotion woven throughout Marissa’s story. There are feelings I understood because I had lived versions of them myself.

But Marissa developed into her own person.

She has her own personality, her own family, her own choices, and her own story.

I think that’s one of the strange things about writing fiction inspired by something real. Eventually the characters stop belonging entirely to the memories that helped create them.

They become themselves.

Her Story Didn’t End With Her Book

This might be my favorite thing about bringing Marissa back for Meet the Character.

If you’ve read some of my other YA books, there’s a chance you’ve already seen her again.

Summer Love Autumn Goodbye is Marissa’s story, but it isn’t the last time she exists in this world.

She later appears throughout the Self Inflicted Saga—Self Inflicted, Scars Fade, and Time Heals—and she also makes appearances in the #BeYourself books.

I never really set out with some giant master plan to create an interconnected universe.

It just happened.

Characters knew each other. Someone from one story made sense in another. And before I knew it, these books had become connected.

I’ve grown to really love that.

Because someone’s life doesn’t stop when their book ends.

Marissa gets to grow older.

She gets to become more than the teenager readers first met.

And readers who have been with me through multiple books get those little moments of recognition when someone walks onto the page and they realize:

Wait. I know her.

The Girl Who Started It All

Marissa will probably always be special to me for another reason.

She was the protagonist of the first story I ever published.

At the time, I had no idea that publishing Summer Love Autumn Goodbye would eventually lead to the Self Inflicted Saga, #BeYourself, the other stories I’ve written, or an entire fantasy world currently taking over a significant portion of my brain.

I definitely didn’t know I’d still be talking about these characters years later.

But here we are.

And it all started with a responsible teenage girl going to spend the summer with her grandparents and meeting a boy she had no idea would change her life.

So if you’re new to my books, meet Marissa.

And if you’ve been here for a while?

Maybe it’s time to say hello again. 🖤

📖 Start Marissa’s story in Summer Love Autumn Goodbye:

https://books2read.com/summerloveautumngoodbye