Pioneering mommy blogger was candid about her struggles
The pioneering mommy blogger Heather Armstrong, who laid bare her struggles as a parent and her battles with depression and alcoholism on her site Dooce.com and on social media, has died at 47.
Armstrong’s boyfriend, Pete Ashdown, said he found her Tuesday night at their Salt Lake City home. He said the cause was suicide.
She had two children with her former husband and business partner, Jon Armstrong, launched Dooce in 2001 and built it into a lucrative career. She was one of the first and most popular mommy bloggers, writing frankly about her children, relationships and other challenges at a time that personal blogs were on the rise.
She parlayed her successes with the blog, on Instagram and elsewhere into book deals, putting out a memoir in 2009, “It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown and a Much Needed Margarita.”
That year, Armstrong appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and was on the Forbes list of the most influential women in media.
In 2012, the Armstrongs announced they were separating. They divorced later that year. She began dating Ashdown, a former U.S. Senate candidate, nearly six years ago. They lived together with Armstrong’s children, 19-year-old Leta and 13-year-old Marlo. He has three children from a previous marriage who spent time in their home as well.
He told the Associated Press that Armstrong had been sober for more than 18 months, and recently had a relapse. He did not provide further details.
Armstrong didn’t hold back on Instagram and Dooce, the latter a name that arose from her inability to quickly spell “dude” during online chats.
In her memoir, she described how her blog began as a way to share her thoughts on pop culture with faraway friends. Within a year, her audience grew from a few friends to thousands of strangers around the world, she wrote.
More and more, Armstrong said, she found herself writing about her personal life and, eventually, an office job for a tech startup in California, and “how much I wanted to strangle my boss, often using words and phrases that would embarrass a sailor.”
Her employer found the site and fired her, she wrote. She took it down but started back up again six months later, writing about her new husband, Armstrong, and how unemployment had forced them to move from Los Angeles to her mother’s basement in Utah.
She was soon pregnant. The pregnancy offered “an endless trove” of content, she wrote, “but I truly believed that I would give it all up once I had the baby.”
She didn’t, going on to chronicle her highs and lows as a new mother.
At its peak, Dooce had more than 8 million monthly readers, a healthy following that allowed her to monetize her online presence.
Armstrong suffered chronic depression for much of her life but wasn’t diagnosed and treated until college, according to her book.
In 2017, after the unraveling of her marriage, the internet star dubbed “the queen of the mommy bloggers” by the New York Times Magazine took a tumble in popularity as social media came into its own.
In 2019, she wrote her third book, “The Valedictorian of Being Dead: The True Story of Dying Ten Times to Live,” about her experiences with the treatment.
“I want people with depression to feel like they are seen,” she told Vox.
If you or a loved one is considering suicide, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at (800) 273-8255.