“For a long time, I was really scared about releasing this book,” says Cleo Wade. Despite having many published books under her belt, her latest, “Remember Love,” felt almost like the first time.
“It’s so much more personal than anything else I’ve ever written, and I wrote so much of it kind of by myself,” Wade continues, “whereas usually I’ll kind of write and then bring it to my girlfriends or workshop it, or a lot of what I write I will put online and so there’s a lot of feedback.”
With “Remember Love,” she didn’t even share it with her partner Simon, nor friends, nor the internet.
“I felt like I wanted as much time alone with it as I could,” she says.
Wade is widely known for her 2017 TED Talk, “Want to change the world? Start by being brave enough to care,” as well as books like “Heart Talk: Poetic Wisdom for a Better Life,” “Where to Begin: A Small Book About Your Power to Create Big Change in Our Crazy World” and “What the Road Said.” She became cohost of the Goop podcast earlier this year, and started working on “Remember Love,” which she considers her first completely original adult work, six months after her first daughter was born (she is now three and a half).
“It was in the beginning of 2020. I had toured while I was six months pregnant. I had two books come out and I was really burnt out, and I really just didn’t know what I would write next because I think when you are struggling through burnout, you really are disconnected from dreaming and imagining and creating. And then I had an idea for this, and it was almost like this book called me to write it,” she says. “I didn’t say, ‘I want to write another book.’ I was like, ‘I don’t want to write another book until something is truly on the highest possible volume within me saying, you’ve got to write.’”
She dedicated the book to her readers, with whom she describes having a “really high-integrity relationship.”
“I don’t feel that I’m someone who writes to get things off my own chest, if that makes sense. I always think about how I can provide space or shelter or a hand to hold for the people that I write for. And so with this book, that was really all I thought about,” she says. “And so even when I was afraid to share these more vulnerable stories from my own life, I was like, I know that this will be so comforting. And I think that at a time where — I don’t know what your algorithm looks like, but mine is like everything is trying to hack something. They want to hack parenting or hack heartbreak. You just need somebody to be there with you, and there just comes a day where you will feel a little bit better, and you need someone who’s just going to kind of hang in there with you. And when I look around, I feel like a lot of what’s missing is people just creating or doing to comfort their community.”
In the years since she’s become famous, her illustrated words scattered across Instagram and her books bestsellers, Wade’s approach to writing has stayed guided by listening to her community’s needs.
“I really just listen to the people around me and then try to say something that’s helpful. But I think we’re in a completely different place than we were 10 years ago when I started writing ‘Heart Talk.’ We’re going through totally different things and the world feels different, and my readers have grown and changed in different ways, and I have some new readers. And so I think more about what is going on right now and as I wrote this book, I really thought, what would help someone right this second? I had so many friends going through divorce or sending their kids to college or moving and feeling lonely during the pandemic, or feeling isolated or feeling off-track with their career goals or feeling like they went through the worst breakup ever. I mean, people are undergoing massive change right now,” Wade says. “And I really wanted to write something that helped people move through these big changes they’re feeling in their lives.”
