“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.
