The Things We Leave Unfinished
The Things We Leave Unfinished
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Rebecca Yarros on The Things We Leave Unfinished
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
Anger at a cliffhanger, then a question she’d never asked herselfThe novel began with a television grievance. Yarros had been watching the Masterpiece Theatre adaptation of Jane Austen’s unfinished fragment ‘Sanditon’ during the pandemic, and the season finale left its central romance deliberately unresolved. The irritation didn’t fade; it turned into a premise.
I was flabbergasted that they ended season one on a cliffhanger, and couldn’t stop thinking, ‘You don’t do Jane Austen like that!’ And boom, I started thinking about The Things We Leave Unfinished.
That irritation pushed her toward a question she had never seriously put to herself across more than twenty published romance novels. As a genre writer whose readers expect a guaranteed happy ending, she had always delivered one. The unfinished Austen adaptation forced her to examine what it would mean to break that contract, and why any romance author would ever choose to.
As a romance author, I have a duty to my readers to deliver a happy-ever-after when writing in that genre. But what would happen if I left a work unfinished, and why would I ever not finish a story? That’s the question that sparked this novel.
The WWII thread at the heart of the novel’s historical timeline was never simply a genre backdrop. Yarros’s family history ran directly into the period she was fictionalizing, and she has spent most of her adult life as the spouse of a military veteran who served across multiple combat deployments, which meant the wartime correspondence at the center of the story carried a specific weight for her.
Both of my grandfathers served in WWII, and one was a POW in Nazi Germany, so this book was exceptionally personal to me.
How she wrote it
A vampire schedule, a phone call to a friend, and a subconscious husbandThe historical portions of the novel required far more preparation than the contemporary ones. The W.A.A.F., the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force, was a branch of British military service that Yarros had not written about before, and the women she found in that research ended up changing what the book was about.
Scarlett and Constance were revelations to me when I read and researched all that the women of the W.A.A.F. went through. Talk about a generation of strong women!
She later noted that the research for the WWII sections took longer than the writing of them, a ratio she had not encountered in her earlier work.
The book’s dual-timeline structure, alternating between wartime Britain and contemporary Colorado, required her to abandon the linear drafting method she had used throughout her career. Writing both timelines in parallel would have meant constant context-switching between two very different emotional registers, so she solved the problem by treating them as two separate manuscripts.
I wrote the book out of chronological order, which was a first for me. Once the first ten chapters were written, I finished the WWII portion of the book, then went back and wrote the contemporary so I could stay firmly grounded in each world.
The ADHD she has spoken about publicly shapes her drafting practice in a specific way: whichever book she is inside receives total, exclusionary focus. She described the experience of writing this standalone after the sprawling Empyrean series in terms of what the smaller scope made possible rather than what it constrained.
It’s just different because whatever book I’m in has my full attention. I have ADHD and I hyper focus in that book. It’s how I can write them so quickly... It’s just a smaller snippet, because it’s more confined, it’s a standalone compared to Fourth Wing.
The pandemic writing schedule she kept while drafting this book was extreme even by her own standards. Partway through, the scope of the dual-timeline story shook her confidence badly enough that she made a phone call to a fellow author to ask whether she was actually capable of finishing it.
Writing this book turned me into a vampire. I was writing from seven p.m. until eight or nine a.m. every night for MONTHS.
The personal thread
A marriage built on letters, a grandfather held in GermanyYarros did not set out to put her husband in the novel. The character of Jameson, an American fighter pilot flying with the RAF in the historical timeline, arrived as an invention. The recognition came later, after the character was already fully formed on the page.
When I dreamed up Jameson, the American fighter pilot with the RAF, I fell hard for all of his qualities, even his stubbornness. Then I turned around and realized I’d pretty much stuck my helicopter pilot husband into the book subconsciously. No wonder I love Jameson!
In her letter to readers, she frames the book’s emotional logic through the specific texture of her own marriage: years of separation, communication reduced to writing, love maintained across distance and danger. That experience is not a metaphor she imports into the story; it is the lived condition the story is built on.
I love this book because it sounds like Billie Holiday and feels like a Colorado sunset. It bears witness to a love that’s held together by letters during wartime, just like my own marriage has been. It speaks to the devotion between sisters, the obligations we take on for family and the ones we let go of in the name of self-preservation.
She wrote the book during the pandemic, a period she has described as one of the hardest of her life without specifying exactly what made it so. The difficulty is present in the prose itself, she says, and she has not tried to edit it out.
It’s my favorite because I wrote it during one of the most difficult times of my life, and though I can still feel that weight in every word, it’s the hope and promise that the right love can bring out the best in all of us that has stayed with me all these years later.
What she wants us to sit with
Escape that costs you something on the way outWhen she talks about what she hoped readers would carry away, she separates the experience of reading from the themes the book contains. The escape comes first; the weight of it is what she wants to linger.
More than anything, I hope they get the escape of a romance, while seeing just how many different types of love shape our lives.
At the launch event for ‘Onyx Storm’ in January 2025, she described returning to this standalone as something that functioned almost like retraining. The Empyrean series had shaken her confidence in herself as a writer, and she needed to go somewhere that didn’t have a dragon to rescue the plot. She named this book as the reason she was able to write the third Empyrean novel at all.
A lot of Iron Flame shook my confidence and shook who I was as a writer and I think going back to romance and being able to really dig in with those characters took me back to character-based plots where there’s no dragons who can come in and save the day or change your plot. It really made it possible for me to go write Onyx.