.jpg)
Andrea McLean: Debt was ‘the toughest thing I’ve ever endured – and I’m a menopausal woman’
- 10 hours ago
- 5 min read
The former Loose Woman talks to Prudence Wade about her experiences with shame on the public stage.
TV presenter Andrea McLean describes going into debt as a “whirling feeling of hopelessness and helplessness” – one she dealt with secretly for a long time.
McLean left her 13 year stint on ITV’s Loose Women in 2020, going on to found a female personal growth business called This Girl Is On Fire – but when the business failed, she and her husband, Nick Feeney, found themselves having serious money troubles.
“It’s the toughest thing I’ve ever endured – and I’m a menopausal woman,” McLean tells the Press Association, suggesting the feeling of “powerlessness” was like “nothing on Earth”.
She continues: “For me, it was a whirling feeling of hopelessness and helplessness, which mainly came at night. Because in the day, you’re trying to stay upbeat for the kids and do all the practical things – being a mum, a parent, a wife, all of these things. You keep busy with that, plus the firefighting.
“But at night, when you’re laying there, everything was just overwhelming – in terms of, I don’t know how to get out of this hole. I know I found it mentally a lot harder than my husband.”
Every night the couple would list three things they were grateful for, which Glasgow-born McLean, 56, suggests is “really easy to do when things are good” – but much harder when they’re not.
The complicated feelings around her money troubles are detailed in McLean’s new book, Shameless: Finding Freedom And Resilience Through Failure. She describes the difficult period after shutting down her business – from being forced to borrow money off family members to pay bills to desperately sending Starbucks a job application, and eventually selling her house in the UK and moving to Spain.
McLean’s TV career began as a weather presenter for GMTV in 1997, and she has since penned books like Confessions Of A Menopausal Woman, which detailed her debilitating symptoms of menopause and undergoing a hysterectomy. She says she made the decision to write Shameless because she was “getting fed up of the feelings that I was feeling: where, ‘Oh, I hope no one finds out’.
“Initially it was about feelings of financial shame because our business had gone under. In this financial shame, there’s loss of status, loss of identity, all of this kind of thing.
“I got fed up of feeling like that, and I thought – I can’t sit in the dark hoping all these feelings will go away.”
The book isn’t just about debt, but covers a range of different types of shame – including topics of sex, parenting, work and more, and how it all showed up in McLean’s life.
She describes writing the book “both cathartic and tough” – and while many readers will relate to the feelings of shame she details, few will have experienced it on a public stage quite like McLean has. She writes about having a brief affair when her first marriage to producer Nick Green was ending – and when someone sold the story to a newspaper, she “took the full hit of public shaming” and felt like “the whole world was judging me”. Feeney is her third husband, and she has two children from her previous marriages.
Looking back on her first brush with public shame, McLean says: “That was the first feeling of, oh, that’s something I’ve experienced personally – now the whole country has a view on it. That’s really weird, because I’m just me: being a human and making mistakes and figuring things out. That took me a long time to get over.”
Once she came out the other side, she says she realised that “actually the world is still turning and it’s kind of OK. It makes it easier the next time.”
Debt hasn’t been only thing disrupting McLean’s life in the past few years, as she’s also experienced some serious health issues. She’s had multiple bouts of Covid, and over Christmas in 2024, she was rushed to hospital with pneumonia, kidney failure and sepsis.
After leaving hospital, McLean suggests she found it difficult to focus on her recovery – particularly as she’s “operated at 100 miles an hour forever”.
She says: “I work really well when there’s lots of plates [spinning] and I’ve got loads to do and loads to think about. It excites me, invigorates me, all those things – until it didn’t. Until I literally crashed and burned.”
McLean says enforced bed rest was “horrible”, until she reframed her recovery.
“I have had to learn to not feel bad when I’m not being productive every minute of the day, and realise that in itself is being productive – just in a different way. When Nick and I re-labelled my time of not working as: your job is to get well.
“I reframed it that way – so my job is to get eight hours sleep, my job is to eat well, rather than it being something that we try squeeze in around everything else, and that massively helped.”
McLean says the moving to Spain last year helped her recovery: “Coming here and slowing down has been a massive part of it. It sounds very ‘woo woo’ – but [it’s been] a part of healing.”
In the book, McLean also speaks about how going to therapy has benefitted her at different stages of her life, but it’s something she came to relatively late, adding: “It came back to being a very pragmatic person – I pushed things down that I didn’t want to look at, and dealt with the thing in front of me.”
She went after taking part in Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins in 2019, saying she had “a few things to work out”, and has since gone with her husband – suggesting it helped them get a “better understanding” of how to argue in a constructive way.
“It really reshaped my whole attitude to therapy – you don’t have to do it in crisis. You can do it if something’s coming up: I think this is going to make things a bit bumpy, let’s get someone on board who is used to dealing with this kind of thing, so there is no drama.
“It’s a great tool, I think everybody should use it.”
McLean ends Shameless with a touching scene of her paying off her final debt on the phone to the credit card company. While she writes that she wasn’t “now somehow flush with money”, it still marked a big moment and a new chapter in her life.
Now, she says it’s her mission with her book to help people feel less alone.
“Shame is such an isolator – it makes us feel less than, we feel hideous, we feel like we’re the only people that are going through whatever it is we’re going through,” she says.
“So that’s why I thought, right: I’ll go first.”
Shameless: Finding Freedom And Resilience Through Failure by Andrea McLean is published by DK Red, priced £16.99. Available now.
