When Andrea McLean hit rock bottom and lost everything she had worked for in her fifties, she felt so much shame that she refused to tell her closest friends.
A string of unfortunate business decisions led the former Loose Women presenter to resort to selling off her clothes and engagement rings on Vinted to pay for food for her children, and look for jobs in Starbucks to make ends meet.
She had quit the hit ITV show after a lifestyle brand she launched with her third husband Nick Feeny started to take off. But they couldn’t have predicted the catastrophic effects of Covid, nor Andrea’s brush with death after collapsing with pneumonia, kidney failure and sepsis, that resulted in her unable to work, losing her home and hundreds of thousands of pounds of life savings.
“I lost everything, literally everything in my fifties,” 56-year-old Andrea tells Ateh Jewel on this week’s episode of HELLO!’s Second Act podcast.
“My home, health, finances, I lost my identity in terms of I'm not ‘that lady’ anymore. When you're in your 20s and you're finding your way in the world, people are a lot more accommodating. I lost it all.”
Now Andrea has written a book called Shameless that lays bare the extent of her downfall, and how she had the resilience to build her life again - although she is keen to point out "we’re not out of the woods just yet."
“I had this shame, that everyone is going to point and laugh at me because ‘oh my God, you had this job on television and you quit to form a business and it didn't work’.
“And I thought, I don't want to just keep hiding hoping no one finds out because actually I've not done anything wrong. I tried something and it didn't work.”
At first she kept the problem to herself, bar her closest family members as they sold off her house and moved to a modest rental in Spain. “My friends were shocked and horrified, they had no idea how bad it had got,” says Andrea.
“I tried to get a job in Starbucks and they didn’t even get back to me, it was humiliating. My agent told me I would never work in TV again if someone saw me.
“That’s all very well, but I needed a job and money to buy food for the kids. Shame is not an option.”
“I've literally done the most embarrassing thing that a human being can do, which is to tell the whole world that they're going to leap out and see if they can fly,” she adds. “And I didn't fly. I landed flat on my face and I completely embarrassed myself.
“We’re still in the trenches, but we’re in a better place, mentally, emotionally. Our relationship survived and that’s huge.
“Now I'm in my second act, and the biggest lesson I've learned is you can get up and start again.”
Listen to the Second Act podcast, now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts and Youtube.
