Cleo Wade Releases Her Most Personal Work Yet, and It's a Must-Read

"This book is the most me I’ve ever felt on a page consistently,” Cleo Wade says of her fifth published work, a collection of prose and poetry called Remember Love: Words for Tender Times. Hitting shelves October 17, Remember Love explores how we can return to the light in darker times, how we find steadiness in the midst of an ever-changing and chaotic world, how we find love again after heartbreak, and how we find strength in letting go. On the page, it is Wade at her most vulnerable, a diary of sorts. For that reason, she is feeling understandably different about this piece of work. There’s a different sense of pride—not just that she wrote a book but that she did the work on herself and could create a road map for others. And there’s a different nervousness in finally sharing it with the world. "It’s really a personal triumph for me,” she says. 

Remember Love came to Wade at a time when she least expected it. The New York Times best-selling author, activist, and poet had released four books—including Heart Talk, Where to Begin, and the children’s book What the Road Said—in rapid succession. After wrapping up an extended book tour while pregnant and splitting her time between Los Angeles, New York, and London, she hit severe burnout. She was unsure of what her future book life looked like and told her literary agent she wanted to explore different avenues and that she’d come back to writing in five years. Shortly after, Wade bumped into postpartum depression after the birth of her first daughter. As she sat in the bathtub one night with her mind in a haze as she listened to a meditation podcast by Tara Brach, attempting to do things she knows are good for her, she heard Brach say two words: "Remember love.” A light bulb clicked on. 

"In the way that I know people have this experience with my own work, I had something snap in me,” Wade says. "It didn’t heal my postpartum depression, but I was in this fog, and it just gave me this bubble of clarity where I could witness myself for two minutes and be like, ‘Oh, whatever I think I’m doing, I need to change what my strategy is around getting through this.’ ‘Remember love’ ended up being the mantra that helped me because I was able to notice how love was not manifesting for myself. … I heard myself beating up myself, and I couldn’t hear that before because I was caught being that voice. There was almost this new thing that came, and that was to remember love. Can I be nice to myself? Could I be gentle? Could I look to this bottom place as a foundational starting point to change my life and my viewpoint? I got a Post-it note, and I wrote ‘Please remember love’ on it. I put it on the top of a board, and I started mapping this book from it.”

Wade went straight into reflection mode, recalling all of her life moments where it would have helped to remember love at the time. She went through experiences of personal heartbreak, the times she observed her friends go through things, the best advice she’d received from friends, and anything that she thought could be helpful to someone else. "I describe this book as I went into the darkest rooms of my personal self or history and retraced my steps to how I found a light within to relight the room, refind myself, rebuild life in some way,” Wade says. 

A few weeks before the release, we caught up with Wade to talk about the scary process of writing Remember Love, the idea that love is our birthright, and creating the ultimate community on tour.

First off, congratulations on Remember Love! I really resonated with the themes of this book and think it’s going to be a great source of light and inspiration for a lot of people. 

I hope so! I feel like I’m always trying to start by writing the book that I really feel like I need because then I know it’s for someone, even if it’s just me. I got to read it again for the first time because I actually got the physical copy a couple of days ago, and I just opened it up to a page and was like, "I needed that.”

How is Remember Love different from your previous books?

This book was very different. With my other books, my friends had read them along the way, and readers online had read some of the stuff that ended up in books, so there was a lot of feedback. This one I wrote completely alone. I didn’t share with anyone until it was finished, which was really scary. If Heart Talk is a huge part of my personality and self, this is a real part of my personhood. There are really personal stories from my childhood and my own breakups. It’s hard to say I have a favorite, but this book is the most me I’ve ever felt on a page consistently. 

 Was the process of going back and revisiting all of these different points in your life—heartbreak, childhood, postpartum depression—through this new lens of remembering love a cathartic experience?

For me as a writer, I feel that my purpose is to really hold people up where they are and try to lift people and try to return people to okayness. One of my girlfriends who read [the book] early was like, "You talk about all of these heavy things, but you always allow there to be this lightness and okayness in how we go through it.” It’s because the reason I wrote the book is so that we can return to love and return to okayness and remember resilience and find steadiness when things are dizzy. So my intention is to travel through these stories in my life or poems but always to return to the message that we can remember love [and that] love is there. We can allow how we speak to ourselves to be filled with the power of love and access that and how we interact with others and how we allow others to interact with us. The idea that we are remembering love as we live is the real intention behind the book.

Was there a section of the book that felt particularly challenging to write or work through personally?

I think probably to make sure I could give my reader the lightness. There were times where there were really early drafts that I had to redraft a lot because I actually had to create more and more distance from how I felt and what was happening. I didn’t want to dump my depression on my readers. I wanted to make sure that my values were clear. A lot of the times, my values are what got me out of a hard time, which is that I understood the value and contemplation that comes with pain and heartache. I also know that every state we are emotionally in is not permanent and is not who we are. For me, the hardest part was some of the early drafts where I was very in it, and I had to remind myself that while I always want to be real and authentic and honest and truthful with my readers, I also want to, like any good friend, be boundried. 

I really try to have my books be companions more than anything. The highest compliment I ever can receive is that I went to it again and again. I’m never like, "Oh my god, I just loved it, and I read it the day I got it.” It’s more like, "It’s always been by my table,” and I hope my book can always be that friend who is really with you at that most alone moment. 

As a mom of two girls, how has your perspective on love changed or evolved?

Something that is profoundly easy to witness with children is that we come into this world feeling very free and drawn to just what we’re drawn to. When you live so intimately in the same house as a child, you realize that love is our birthright. We are born thinking there’s nothing wrong with who we are and feeling completely and utterly enough. For me, it became very clear that there is this point of return for us, which is who we are when we’re in a nurtured nest where everyone every day is affirming that we are enough and we’re okay and that our curls are great.

When you have these daughters, they really celebrate themselves. They celebrate that they laughed. As I was writing, the destination of how we should feel about ourselves was very clear to me because I see it in my own house. They are the oak tree or the flower. It’s very natural to not overly consider your flaws and to just be what you are. That’s deeply found in the natural world. Because there are so many man-made things, we forget that we are actually a part of this natural world. We are actually much closer to the tree in your backyard or the flowers that bloom or the leaves that are falling. Our nature is much closer to that nature than it is to some app that is generating a screenplay. 

A lot of your work centers around affirmations. Do you have daily affirmations you tell yourself? 

I definitely do. One that I have been thinking about a lot lately is… I’ve never put this in one of my books, but my friend said it to me once. She said, "Your life experiences are only as valuable as your ability to turn them into life lessons.” I didn’t know it at the time as I was writing this book, but I think a lot of this book draws back to that affirmation of these experiences. We do have this ability to alchemize these experiences, to turn your dust and your dirt into gold by turning them into life lessons. For me, that is such a huge part of who I am as a person and my work.

You mentioned you’ve been working on how to tour the book in a unique way. What will be different about this one? 

What I think is a very unique thing that I’m so excited about is that I brought Bumble for Friends on this tour with me. It’s not sponsored. It’s not an ad. It’s not paid. I know Whitney [Wolfe Herd]—who started it—well, and we constantly talk about how hard it is for people to make friends. On my other tours, we always had sign-up sheets for people to meet or get back together, but we noticed there was always a fall-off. The idea that we connect my readers and my audience on tour is not new at all. We’ve always done that since my first tour. … But I said to Whitney, "It just keeps falling off. I feel like they are not able to stay connected because then it’s a big group.” So I called Whitney and was like, "Do you think that we could bring Bumble on to encourage people to have a profile that makes it easier to connect?” Because then you are connecting for a friend space.

One of the things that is special is we created this thing called Friendship Hour. It’s like a happy hour but for meeting friends, and I personally wrote icebreakers. I’m going to go to every single one. I’m going to bring a bunch of my friends to each one to be like that camp counselor to help connect. I’m making name tags. I’m really looking forward to every stop as its own unique one. It’s more about looking at each thing as a true gathering specific to who’s coming and where it is. It’s really like a big friendship fest, the tour. There will also be some cool surprises along the way. More than anything, I wanted to think about how I could make the tour… I don’t want to diminish myself or the book, but I did want to make it bigger than me. If I’m going to leave my kids for a week and travel all around, I really want to help people find each other. I don’t just want to go and talk about words I wrote. I want it to be fun. I want it to be a party. 

Grab your copy of Remember Love: Words for Tender Times today.