Heather Armstrong, ‘Queen of the Mommy Bloggers’, has died at age 47

Heather Armstrong, the breakout star behind the website Dooce, who has been hailed as the queen of so-called mommy bloggers for giving millions of readers daily intimate glimpses of her odyssey through parenthood and marriage, as well as her poignant struggle with depression, passed away Tuesday at her home. home in Salt Lake City. She was 47.

Pete Ashdown, her old partner, who found her body at home, said the cause was suicide.

Born Heather Brooke Hamilton, Mrs. Armstrong was a lapsed Mormon who grew up in Bartlett, Tennessee, a suburb of Memphis, and later lived in Salt Lake City. She rose to prominence at the start of the personal blogging craze of the early 2000s; her baptism in the field came after she graduated from Brigham Young University in 1997 and moved to Los Angeles, where she taught herself HTML code and took a job at a technology company.

She started Dooce in 2001 and, according to one version of the story, christened it with the nickname she earned after making a typo writing the word “dude” in an AOL Instant Messenger chat with friends.

Early on, she used her experiences as a tech drone for material — firing sharp salvos about the absurdities of startup culture in the swelling dot-com bubble, publishing, for example: bro-like statements overheard at a company Christmas party. (“Ruben, dude, you can’t stand on the table. Or on the bar.”)

A year later, her candor on her blog got her fired, an experience that inspired a popular internet phrase, “Dooced,” referring to people who scan job openings after posting ill-advised comments online. The term even found its way into “Jeopardy!”

She felt guilty about the experience. “I cried in my exit interview‘ she recalled. “My boss, who has been the subject of some of my more vicious posts, sat across the table from me and couldn’t look me in the face, she was so hurt. I had never felt like such a horrible human being, even though in my mind I thought I was just being creative and funny.”

But that career setback opened up huge opportunities for fortune and fame. In an era when countless people, especially women, started personal blogs—often just for the enjoyment of friends and family—Ms. Armstrong saw a glimpse of commercial opportunity.

As the blogging boom neared its peak in 2009, Ms. Armstrong was a blogging powerhouse, appearing on “The Oprah Winfrey Showand attracts some 8.5 million readers per month, according to a 2019 Vox article, while drawing a stream of revenue from banner ads, sponsored posts, books, speaking fees, and other sources. The news media dubbed her “the queen of mommy bloggers.”

Along the way, the six-bedroom home on a Salt Lake City cul-de-sac that she shared with her then-husband and business partner, Jon Armstrong, and her two children acted as a fishbowl for her cultically devoted readers.

As noted in a 2011 profile by Lisa Belkin in The New York Times Magazine, Ms. Armstrong was the only blogger to make that year’s Forbes list of the most influential women in media; she was ranked No. 26, one slot behind Tina Brown of The Daily Beast. The article quoted a sales representative for Federated Media, the company that sold ads on its site, as calling Ms. Armstrong “one of our most successful bloggers,” adding, “Our most successful bloggers can gross $1 million.”

As Ms. Armstrong said in the Vox interview, “I saw myself as someone who happened to be able to do that talk about parenting in a way, many women wanted it, but were afraid.”

Nothing seemed off limits as she told readers about “poop and spitting,” Ms. Belkin wrote. ‘And stomach viruses and washing machine repairs. And home design, and tense dogs, and reality television, and sewer disasters, and chiropractor visits.

But Mrs. Armstrong did not shy away from thornier topics, including her muddled break with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In a 2017 post describing why she left the churchshe recalled, with some horror, a blog she wrote two days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, in which she compared the Mormons, in their devotion to authority, to the Islamist terrorists who flew the jetliners into buildings.

“I’m not particularly proud of it,” she added. “I’d had a martinis or two when I wrote it, but my dad was a little upset and told me I was ‘a disgusting creature who had succumbed to the dark side’.”

The subjects got even darker. In 2009, Ms. Armstrong wrote about her struggle with postnatal depressionafter the birth of her first child, in a best-selling memoir titled “It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita.”

However, few readers were ready when she and her husband, who also ran a blog, broke the news in 2012 that they were separating. The breakup of the family enraged many Dooce loyalists, who had come to cherish her portrayal of a charmed marriage and family life. It also seemed to embolden the anonymous critics on internet forums who had long held resentful grudges about her seemingly idyllic life and financial success.

Feeling pressure from all sides, she reduced her blogging efforts and put more emphasis on her mental health.

In 2019 she published “The farewell of being dead,” a haunting reminder of her many attempts at therapy for depression, including one in which she was repeatedly given propofol (which she called “the Michael Jackson drug”) to induce a coma. “I felt fantastic!” she wrote. “If you want to be dead, nothing beats being dead.”

Besides Mr. Ashdown, her two children are among her survivors.

Mrs. Armstrong’s efforts to find peace continued. In a post on Dooce last month, she talked about her turn to sobriety in recent years, writing that “22 years of suffering I was sedated with alcohol, had come to life and transformed myself into an almost alien life form.”

She compared the experience to the shock of electrocution, writing, “I was forced to stare this savage savage right in the face, and now I look around and think, ‘Oh, this. This is just life. All this is just a physical response to psychological pain.’”

“Sobriety wasn’t a mystery I had to solve,” she added. “It was just looking at all my wounds and learning to live with them.”

If you are having suicidal thoughts, call or text 988 to reach the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources.