Clea Shearer on Her ‘Self-Loathing’ During Breast Cancer Treatment and How the Disease Changed Her ‘Forever’ (Exclusive)

NEED TO KNOW

• Clea Shearer — co-founder of The Home Edit, along with best friend Joanna Teplin — was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2022

• Since then, she’s undergone chemo and radiation treatment and 14 surgeries

Clea Shearer is in her Nashville home, leaning back on an ivory bouclé sofa in a living room fragrant with pale green hydrangeas and white roses. She’s smiling, her skin is glowing, and her nails are impeccably manicured.

It’s a flawless scene — fitting for a woman who made a name as the co-founder of the organizing empire (and celeb favorite) The Home Edit. But the picture doesn’t tell the whole story.

Tucked behind her back, hidden in the folds of her soft pink sweater, two drains collect fluid after her recent surgery — her 13th — for reconstruction after breast cancer. The drains were supposed to be out by the time she sat down for photos, but like much of what’s happened in the past three and a half years since her diagnosis, things haven’t gone according to plan.

“I’ve had photo shoots when I was in chemo. I had photo shoots through radiation, but I’ve never had one with a drain pack attached to my body,” she says. “I’m so distracted making sure no one can see them. But this is my life at this point. I’m just trying to make do.”

After finding out she had stage 2 breast cancer — and facing reconstruction complications following her double mastectomy — Shearer, 43, has learned to accept the unexpected. “The opening line in my book is: ‘If you’re a person who likes to control things, cancer is not the disease for you,’ ” says Shearer, who has chronicled her journey in her new memoir Cancer Is Complicated (out Sept. 23, available for preorder now). “It is a roller coaster.”

In February 2022, Shearer, an L.A. native who moved to Nashville with her photographer husband, John, 10 years ago, was very much a woman in control.

After she and best friend Joanna Teplin prettied up pantries for Hollywood pals like Mandy Moore and Christina Applegate, The Home Edit, the organizing company the two began in 2015, became a brand in demand, known for its rainbow color-coding and clear-bin storage aesthetic.

A line of signature products at Walmart followed, along with a Reese Witherspoon-produced Netflix show followed, called Get Organized With the Home Edit, on which the pair straighten up for Chris Pratt, Khloé Kardashian, Kevin Hart and others. Shearer and Teplin had just announced that Witherspoon’s company Hello Sunshine bought their business when Shearer discovered a lump in her right breast.

Learning it was cancer was “pure terror,” she writes. When doctors discovered she had an aggressive form of the disease that had spread to her lymph nodes, she suddenly faced months of chemo and radiation before breast reconstruction could begin.

“Because I have work brain on all the time, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh — Hello Sunshine! I need them to know I’m not going away.’ I tried really hard to still do as much as I could and quickly realized I simply could not,” she says of continuing to work at her normal pace, including filming a TV show during treatment. “Joanna stepped up,” says Shearer, who adds that her friend and partner “kept me alive in so many ways. I would wither away without her friendship. Says Teplin: “Clea has been through so much, but she’s faced every single part of it with strength and grace.”

But, Shearer admits, “We both struggled immensely.”

At home Shearer struggled too. She waited until the night before her first surgery to tell her children Stella, then 11, and Sutton, then 8, she had cancer: “I didn’t want them to carry fear any longer than necessary.” Stella asked if she’d be bald. “I said no — at the time I didn’t think I’d need chemo. That conversation needed to be updated. But they were so impressively brave.”

Her husband, John (“the best human being on the planet and a blue-ribbon husband”), was able to rearrange his work as a music and celebrity photographer (he was behind the lens for her PEOPLE pictures) to be by her side, but “disease and sickness tests everyone.”

When chemo took her once long dark hair, along with her eyebrows and her eyelashes, and steroids caused her to gain weight, “I had a lot of self-loathing,” she says. “I felt disgusting. I thought I looked like Charlotte’s husband, Harry, from Sex and the City. John would say, ‘What are you talking about? I think you look beautiful.’ But I was looking in the mirror like, ‘You can’t think I do.’ ”

At first she was so self-conscious, she refused to walk around her own house without a scarf or a hat. “I thought the kids would be uncomfortable seeing me like that,” she says. “I was drowning in how to physically cover myself up every day.” But the persistent reassurance from John and her kids “meant so much. It made me more confident.” Says John: “Her resilience has beyond exceeded what anyone could expect.”

As soon as her “peach fuzz” began to grow back, “I was like, ‘That’s it. I have hair, no more wigs.’ ”

Soon after her diagnosis, she made a point of sharing everything, from her hair changes to her insecurities, with The Home Edit’s 6 million-plus social media followers, for the same reason she decided to write her book: “The only way I knew how to go about this was instead of feeling despair, I was going to be proactive. People ask, how did I stay so positive? It’s because I felt like I was helping people.”

However, when she began posting, she had no idea how long an ordeal it would be.

Soon after her double mastectomy, her skin began to turn black — she had developed necrosis. Radiation on her right breast caused thick scarring. It all made reconstruction more challenging. Shearer has spent nearly two years in and out of operating rooms — and even ended up back in the ER for yet another surgery a week after her PEOPLE shoot when fluid began to build up after her drains were finally removed.

She’s on her “last shot” for an implant — and she knows some might wonder why she’d go through such trauma to rebuild her breasts. “I have now lived three years with compromised breasts. At this point, I’m not looking to be in a bathing suit competition,” she says. “But for me there’s a real need to put my body back together. It’s an emotional need more than a physical one.”

Whatever happens, because of cancer, “everything in my life has changed,” she says, adding that doctors have told her that there’s a 30% chance her cancer could return: “I know I will continue to battle this coming back forever.” But she says she’s discovered an inner strength: “I didn’t know that I could handle so much.”

And that includes the challenge of posing for a PEOPLE photo shoot while still recovering from surgery.

“I have limitations. I move a little slower. I can’t lift my right arm [at the moment]. But we’re getting there,” says Shearer, nodding to her husband, who earlier that morning had changed her bandages and emptied her drains, as he pauses between shots. Besides, she adds with a smile: “John will make me look good!”

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