The Home Edit's Clea Shearer: 'I'VE LEARNED HOW STRONG I AM'

IN 2022 THE HOME EDIT COFOUNDER WAS DIAGNOSED WITH BREAST CANCER. FOURTEEN SURGERIES LATER, SHE HAS A NEW BOOKAND IS STILL HOPING TO REBUILD' HER BODY

- EILEEN FINAN

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 cofounder 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, are two drains collecting 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 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). “It is a roller coaster.”