Why Marty Reynaud Is My Favorite Character to Write (Even Though Jim Garraty Is My Narrator)

Why Marty Reynaud Is My Favorite Character to Write (Even Though Jim Garraty Is My Narrator)

Every writer has a character who sneaks up on them—someone who wasn’t planned, wasn’t outlined, wasn’t engineered to carry the emotional weight of a story, yet somehow becomes its quiet center of gravity. For me, that character isn’t Jim Garraty, even though he’s the narrator of the Reunion Duology, its protagonist, and the voice readers follow.

It’s Marty Reynaud.

And the truth is, she didn’t arrive with fanfare. She wasn’t even meant to be a major character. She emerged from a writing exercise, stepped into a dream sequence, and then—almost before I realized what was happening—became the emotional heartbeat of everything that followed.

Here is the moment she enters the story on the page:

Enter Marty: An Excerpt from Reunion: Coda

Slowly, ever so slowly, the heavy door to the chorus room creaked open. We all looked to see who was entering the room.

It was a girl. She was tall but not gawky, clad in new “first day of the semester” jeans, a white blouse that peeked out from under a navy-blue jacket, and clean new Keds girls’ sneakers. Her chestnut-colored hair was pulled up into a ponytail, and her cheeks were rosy against her pale skin, partly because it was cold outside, partly because she thought she was interrupting the class.

“Can I help you?” Mrs. Quincy asked.

The girl hesitated at the door, clutching her backpack tightly. She looked at Mrs. Quincy nervously and fumbled for a piece of paper in her pocket. She walked up to the teacher, holding out the class schedule change form with both hope and a bit of fear. She bit her lip and waited for Mrs. Quincy’s reaction, hoping she wouldn’t be turned away or scolded.

Mrs. Quincy reached for the form and, in that grandmotherly way of hers, said, “Oh, don’t worry, young lady. These gentlemen and I are done for the period. First day’s not too busy.”

The girl let out a sigh of relief and gave Mrs. Quincy a shy smile but said nothing.

Mrs. Quincy scanned the form, nodded a couple of times as she read it, and reached into her jacket pocket for a pen to sign it – and came up empty-handed.

“Quick,” she said as she snapped her fingers. “Any of you men have a pen?”

“I do, Mrs. Quincy,” I said, holding up the Bic pen I’d had in my jacket pocket as if it were the torch held by the Statue of Liberty. Without being prompted, I got up from my chair, walked over to Mrs. Quincy, and handed her the pen.

“See?” Mrs. Quincy said to the girl as she marked the schedule change form as approved and signed it with a flourish, “Chivalry isn’t quite dead in 1981.”

The girl gave me a shy smile but said nothing.

Oh, boy. She’s gorgeous! I thought. Even though she’s probably suffering from first-day jitters, she’s beautiful.

On the heels of that: I better get a grip. For all I know, she probably has a boyfriend. Or maybe I am just dreaming, and she isn’t really here.

That first entrance contains so much of what would define her: shyness, warmth, gravity, and the immediate sense that Jim’s life has just tilted in a new direction.

She was born from a shift in tone — and a shift in me

In the interview I did for Leonberger Life, I mentioned that the dream sequence in Reunion: A Story originally had a very different tone. It began as something lighter, even flirtatious, until I realized it needed to be something deeper. As I put it there:

“The subject of the dream also changed from a steamy fantasy Jim has to something more romantic and meaningful, which led to creating a new character — that’s how Marty came into the picture.”

That shift — from fantasy to meaning — is the moment Marty was born.

She wasn’t created to be a love interest or a symbol. She was created because the story needed someone who could carry emotional truth. And once she appeared, she refused to be anything less.

She became the emotional center of the Duology

Jim may be the lens, but Marty is the light.

Everything the Reunion Duology explores — memory, longing, regret, emotional inheritance, the ache of what almost was — flows through her. She is the central panel of the triptych I described in the interview: Reunion: A Story in the middle, Reunion: Coda framing it on either side.

Without Marty, the Duology doesn’t exist.
Without Marty, Jim’s arc has no anchor.
Without Marty, the emotional stakes collapse.

She is the reason the story matters.

She embodies the themes I didn’t consciously set out to write

When I wrote the original novella in 1998, I wasn’t thinking about themes. I wasn’t trying to craft a message. I was grieving the loss of a classmate who had died in a car crash, and that grief seeped into the story in ways I didn’t fully understand at the time.

Marty became the vessel for that grief—and for the tenderness grief often reveals. She became the embodiment of the “what if” that haunts so many of us: the girl Jim loved before he knew how to love, the one whose absence shaped his adulthood as much as her presence shaped his youth.

Writing her means writing the emotional truth beneath the plot.

She exists in two timelines — and two emotional realities

One of the most compelling things about writing Marty is that she lives in two places at once:

• In 1983, she is alive, vibrant, shy, affectionate, and emotionally fluent in ways Jim isn’t.
• In 2000, she is gone — a memory, a loss, a wound that never fully healed.

And in Jim’s heart, she is both.

That duality gives her scenes a resonance unlike anything else I write. She is a presence and an absence, a beginning and an ending, a catalyst and a ghost.

Writing her means writing the echo and the original sound at the same time.

She changed the story simply by existing

When I first wrote the core of Reunion: A Story, I thought I was done. I almost filed it away forever. But then I listened to Billy Joel’s “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant,” and suddenly the story felt unfinished. I added the elegiac frame story, and in doing so, I realized that Marty wasn’t just part of Jim’s past — she was the emotional hinge of his entire life.

Characters who do that—who reshape the narrative simply by being themselves—are rare. They’re the ones who feel most alive.

She’s brave in the way real people are brave

Marty’s bravery isn’t cinematic. It’s not loud or dramatic. It’s the kind of courage that happens in small, trembling steps:

• speaking honestly even when she’s unsure
• reaching out even when she’s scared
• letting herself care even when she knows it could hurt

That kind of bravery is harder to write — and infinitely more rewarding.

She’s tied to the music that shaped both the story and my writing life

Music is woven into the DNA of the Reunion Duology. It’s how Jim and Marty meet. It’s how they connect. It’s how their emotional vocabulary develops.

But music also shaped my writing life. As I said in the interview, even in ninth grade I wrote while listening to John Williams scores. That habit never left me. Music became the emotional scaffolding of my creative process.

So when I write Marty, I’m not just writing a character.
I’m writing to a soundtrack.
I’m writing to memory.
I’m writing to the rhythm of who I was when I first imagined her.

She represents the story’s heart — and Jim represents its voice

Jim is the narrator.
Jim is the protagonist.
Jim is the one readers follow.

But Marty?
Marty is the reason the story exists.

She is the emotional blueprint for everything Jim becomes. She is the tenderness that lingers long after the moment has passed. She is the “before” that gives the “after” its weight.

Writing Jim is like steering the ship.
Writing Marty is like discovering the ocean.

And honestly — I just love writing her

Not because she’s perfect.
Not because she’s tragic.
But because she feels human in a way that’s intimate, familiar, and quietly luminous.

She’s shy without being fragile.
She’s confident without performing confidence.
She’s affectionate without calculation.
She’s emotionally fluent in ways Jim isn’t — and that contrast makes every scene between them feel alive.

Writing Marty feels less like invention than discovery—like brushing dust off something that was always there, waiting.

Jim may be the narrator.
He may be the protagonist.
He may be the voice.

But Marty?
Marty is the heartbeat.

And that’s why she’s my favorite character to write.