The blogger who wrote frankly of motherhood

Heather Armstrong 1975–2023

Heather Armstrong brought realness to writing about motherhood. In her blog, Dooce, she punctured the sanctimony usual in discussions of childrearing, telling all and airbrushing nothing. Blunt, witty, and often profane, Armstrong wrote about breastfeeding and dirty diapers but also delved deeper and darker, detailing her struggles with her alcoholism, her divorce, and her lapse from Mormonism. There are “demons that terrorize me from the moment I get out of bed,” she wrote of the postpartum depression that hospitalized her in 2004. At the blog’s peak in 2009, she had more than 8 million monthly readers and earned as much as $50,000 a month from advertising. Armstrong, who died by suicide, said in 2019 that her blog was a place to “talk about parenthood in a way many women wanted to be able to but were afraid to.”

Armstrong grew up in a suburb of Memphis, where “she was a straight-A student,” said The Wall Street Journal. Raised by devout Mormons, she attended Brigham Young University, then moved to Los Angeles to work as a web designer. She started Dooce in 2001 as a venue for gripes about tech culture. When she was fired for writing about her job, a resulting post went viral, said CNN.com, “and Dooce was on its way to becoming a digital phenomenon.” After she moved to Salt Lake

City with her husband and had the first of two children in 2004, she focused her blog on “the trials of young motherhood.” That made her one of the first voices in what would turn into a huge industry of “mommy blogging.”

Even as Armstrong “created possibility for women on the internet, she collided early with its dark side,” said The New York Times. When she began accepting ads, she “faced vitriol from readers,” which only grew when she announced her divorce in 2012. Mockery from trolls fueled a “descent into depression” that led to a retreat from blogging and experimental treatments she detailed in a 2019 book. Resuming drinking, she sporadically wrote “disturbing and erratic posts” that “alarmed” fans—in particular, a rant about pronouns inspired by her child coming out as nonbinary. Her final post, from April, described her drinking as an effort to numb “22 years of agony” she likened to a “wild-eyed savage.” Sobriety, she wrote, entailed “looking at all my wounds and learning how to live with them.”