How Rebecca Yarros Learned to Log Off — and Why You Should, Too (Exclusive)

The bestselling Empyrean Series author explains how she learned to put down her phone — and how her new contemporary romance, 'Variation,' helped her get there

When Rebecca Yarros' romantasy Fourth Wing went viral in 2023, selling more than 2 million copies and generating over a billion views on TikTok, the author's profile skyrocketed with it.

Almost instantly, the 43-year-old writer drew the attention of a ravenous online community, which brought adoring fans and harsh critics — including death threats — to her doorstep, sometimes literally. She and her husband, Jason, 44, were even forced to move to protect their family’s privacy and her health.

Yarros spent the next year throwing herself into her work and trying to figure out how to keep life “as normal as we could” for her two girls and four boys, ages 11 to 27, even as fans hotly debated everything from her writing ability to her personal life.

“It was a tidal wave,” she tells PEOPLE for a story in this week's print issue tied to her new contemporary romance, Variation, out Tuesday, Nov. 19 from Montlake.

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“Social media is very much like a hall of mirrors, and when you stare too long, it distorts who you think you are,” she explains, echoing what she told her kids when the online firestorm began. “Mostly it’s just remembering that real life is what happens inside my house and not in my phone."

Related: Rebecca Yarros' New Book Saved Her: 'If I Hadn't Written Variation, I Wouldn't Have Written Onyx Storm' (Exclusive)

It took the author some time to figure out that logging off and ignoring the noise was a valid — and healthy — way to deal with it and to try not to take to heart what strangers say online. "As long as my kids, my husband, my family and my friends know who I am, it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks. But it's taken me a year and a half to get there."

Her new book played a key role in that process as she wove some of what she experienced into her characters. "I've had a year to kind of adjust and grow and write Variation, which I think helped process a lot of those emotions," she says. "Having gone through a social media explosion like that, [I thought about] how that affects somebody ... if they hadn't opened that app, What would they have done differently that day?"

But much like reading helped Yarros find connection when she needed community, as a former military kid whose husband is also a retired Army pilot, she acknowledges that social media is valuable too.

"There are really good positives of social media ... and I personally love the dopamine hits from it," she admits. "I think we're all looking for human connection. And it's really easy to kind of transfer social media relationships or [focus] all of our attention there, instead of keeping it between human-human contact."

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That's something Yarros tries to create in her novels, and why the author of 25 books and counting will never give up on writing romance or fantasy.

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"I think I always found human connection within books ... I would read a romance novel a night when my husband was deployed," she says. And that's not the only benefit.

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"I've been married to my husband for a really long time, and we met at 19, and so like, I will never fall in love again," the author adds, with a laugh. "Like, that's it! He's my Mr. Right! But reading a book, or writing that book, I get to experience what that's like: to fall in love over and over and over again."

Variation by Rebecca Yarros is available now, wherever books are sold.