Parenting blogger Heather Armstrong has died, at the age of 47. Heather rose to fame in the 2000s, when she documented the journey of motherhood on her blogging website Dooce.
Her partner Pete Ashdown told the Associated Press he had discovered Armstrong on Tuesday night in their home in Utah. She often wrote about her children, relationship and personal struggles, being touted the “queen of mommy blogging” in the process.
According to Vox, Dooce received over eight million visitors a month at its peak. In 2009 Forbes named Armstrong in the annual list of the 30 most influential women in media.
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Dooce began in the early 2000s as a space to write about work, sex and leaving the Mormon church. According to the Associated Press and New York Times, the origin of the site’s name was an inside joke that played on her inability to spell out the word “dude” quickly in online chats.
Armstrong was sacked from her job as a web designer in 2002 in Los Angeles after the sardonic blog – which featured co-workers became nicknamed things like That One Co-worker Who Manages to Say Something Stupid Every Time He Opens His Mouth – was discovered to be hers. Her firing caused a public discussion about privacy, with her blog’s page hits only increasing as a result.
Six months later the blog was restarted by Armstrong with slightly different themes after she fell pregnant the following year.
She wrote sincerely about a plethora of parental struggles including her children’s temper tantrums, her mental health challenges, and her struggles with alcoholism and postpartum depression. By 2009 the blog may have been generating $40,000 (£32,000) a month in revenue from paid advertising according to an estimate quoted in the Wall Street Journal.
Armstrong transferred her success into a strong social media presence and three books, which included the 2009 memoir It Sucked and then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita.
The book documented her lifelong battle with chronic depression, with her disclosing she did not received treatment until she got to college.
The caption on a Dooce Instagram page confirming her passing on Wednesday reads: “Hold your loved ones close and love everyone else.”
Ashdown told the AP that Armstrong had been sober for other 18 months but had recently relapsed. He said she had died by suicide.
She is survived by her ex-husband Jon, her daughter Leta, 19, her son Marlo, 14, and Ashdown, as well as his three children from a previous marriage.
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