Stabilized on new medication, Armstrong wrote a 2010 bestseller about her breakdown, “It Sucked and Then I Cried,” had another baby, Marlo, and got divorced. Readers followed her and many began to think of her as a friend, someone they often worried about, someone who encouraged them to tell their own stories online. When news spread on Wednesday that she had committed suicide at the age of 47, thousands of those women mourned her online.
Rebecca Woolf, a writer who started her own successful blog “Girl’s Gone Child” in 2005, said Armstrong inspired her. “She shaped the internet as we know it today — launching a million storytellers with her willingness to write boldly and unapologetically about the struggles of being human,” Woolf wrote.
Ree Drummond, who grew her blog “The Pioneer Woman” into a TV show and retail empire while Armstrong was at the height of her fame, simply wrote, “My heart is breaking.”
But just as Armstrong was creating opportunities for women on the internet, she clashed early on with its dark side. When hers became one of the first personal websites to accept display advertising, she faced vitriol from readers. An online group known as GOMI (Get Off My Internets) predated Reddit as a place to bully bloggers. Anonymous members of the site criticized Armstrong for her parenting, haircuts and weight loss. They mocked her mental health issues and more recently her relationship with Pete Ashdown, a successful Utah businessman and former U.S. Senate candidate, with whom she shared a home from August 2018 until her death this week.
In an interview yesterday, Ashdown said he blamed hate and a sea change in the blogging landscape for Armstrong’s descent into depression in 2015. She took a break from the blog because, as she said at the time, she was tired of harsh comments . and of the need to create artificial situations in which her children can showcase sponsors’ products. She also became increasingly depressed and when she posted, the depth of her pain disturbed many of her longtime followers.