A Literary Prescription for
For learning to be on your own side — not as narcissism, but as the quiet, necessary act of treating yourself as someone worth caring for.
Self-love gets a bad reputation because it is often confused with selfishness or self-absorption, neither of which it resembles. Real self-love is closer to the attitude you would have toward a dear friend — warm, honest, forgiving of failures, genuinely interested in their flourishing. The books, poems, and words gathered here are about building that relationship with yourself, from wherever you are currently starting.
“To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance.”Oscar Wilde
Books
Books that make the case for self-love as foundation, not indulgence.
Hay’s landmark book, which has sold over fifty million copies, builds its entire framework on a single premise: that loving yourself is the answer. Whatever your view of her affirmation-based approach, her central insight — that most self-sabotage is rooted in the belief that you are not worthy of good things — is borne out by decades of subsequent research. For readers at the beginning of a self-love practice, Hay is the place to start.
Ruiz draws on Toltec wisdom to argue that the relationship you have with yourself is the template for every relationship you will ever have. For readers whose self-love is undermined by how they were loved as children, Ruiz offers both explanation and a practical way to start rewriting the template, rather than simply enduring it.
Darling’s approach to self-love is deliberately joyful and irreverent — rooted in the idea that loving yourself should feel like fun rather than homework. For readers who find the softer, more therapeutic approaches to self-love too earnest, Darling offers the same wisdom with more glitter and considerably more laughter.
Hooks’s examination of what love actually is — as opposed to what we were taught it was — includes one of the most important chapters on self-love ever written. She argues that loving yourself is not a starting point you can skip; it is the ground everything else grows from. Her definition of love as “the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth” remains one of the clearest ever articulated.
Part memoir, part practical healing guide, Georgia’s own book traces the slow, often unglamorous work of learning to love herself after a period of profound upheaval — not as a single realisation but as hundreds of small, repeated choices. Drawing on Reiki-informed practice and unflinching personal honesty, it offers real, lived company for anyone whose self-love has to be rebuilt rather than simply remembered.
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine
Eleanor has survived a great deal by deciding she does not need anyone, including, on some level, herself — and the novel is about what happens when that armour finally, carefully, comes off. It is funny and devastating in roughly equal measure, and it lands on something true about self-love: it is often less dramatic and more patient than people expect.
Poetry
Poems that model the quality of attention self-love requires.
“the hurt”
Nayyirah Waheed, salt., 2013
Waheed’s spare, contemporary style does in five lines what whole books on self-love sometimes take chapters to say: that someone else’s absence can be the exact thing that turns your attention back to yourself. It is a small, sharp poem, and it tends to stay with people.
“Wild Geese”
Mary Oliver, 1986
The poem moves from an act of release — setting down an old, exhausting requirement to earn approval through suffering — into an invitation to simply trust your own instincts and appetites, however ordinary or undignified they might seem. By the final stanza, Oliver has widened the frame from one anxious person to the whole turning world, geese included, all of it announcing its own belonging without asking permission first. For readers whose self-love is blocked by a perfectionism that insists they become someone else before they qualify for care, the poem’s argument is that belonging was never conditional to begin with. Find it in Dream Work.
“Desiderata” (extract)
Max Ehrmann, 1927
Ehrmann’s prose poem, written almost a century ago and still quoted everywhere, distils self-love to its most fundamental claim: you have a right to be here. For anyone whose inner critic disputes that claim daily, Ehrmann states it quietly and absolutely.
Quotes & Prose
Lines for the practice of being on your own side.
You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.
Buddha
Owning our story and loving ourselves through that process is the bravest thing that we’ll ever do.
Brené Brown
Document the moments you feel most in love with yourself — what you’re wearing, who you’re around, what you’re doing. Recreate and repeat.
Warsan Shire
You have been criticising yourself for years and it hasn’t worked. Try approving of yourself and see what happens.
Louise Hay
From Georgia
A short practice for sitting with self-love, whenever you need somewhere to land.
Healing Self-Talk: Self-Love Meditation
Listen Now For FreeThe Inner Peace Toolkit
2 guided meditations, an Inner Peace Journal, an affirmations eBook, 10 printable affirmation prints and 10 calming phone wallpapers — small daily practices to come back to whenever you need to slow down and reconnect with yourself.
Explore the Toolkit →