Mommy Blogger Heather Armstrong, Known As Dooce To Fans, Dead At 47

NEW YORK – Heather Armstrong, a pioneering mommy blogger who shared her problems as a mother and her battles with depression and alcoholism on her website Dooce.com and on social media, died at age 47.

According to her boyfriend, Pete Ashdown, Armstrong committed herself, who discovered her Tuesday night at their Salt Lake City home.

According to Ashdown, Armstrong had been sober for almost 18 months but relapsed lately. He didn’t go into any greater detail.

Armstrong founded Dooce in 2001 with her ex-husband and business partner, Jon Armstrong, and has grown into a wealthy career. She was one of the first and most prominent mother bloggers, openly discussing her children, relationships, and other issues.

She turned her blog, Instagram, and other accomplishments into book sales, releasing a memoir in 2009 called “It Sucked, and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita.”

Armstrong was on Oprah and was named one of Forbes’ most powerful women in media.

The Armstrongs announced their divorce in 2012. Later that year, they divorced. She started dating Ashdown, a former U.S. senator, approximately six years ago. They shared a home with Armstrong’s children, Leta, 19, and Marlo, 13. He has three children from a previous marriage who spent time with them.

Armstrong didn’t hold back on Instagram or Dooce, a moniker inspired by her inability to quickly spell “dude” during online talks. Her candid, unapologetic tweets on topics ranging from pregnancy and breastfeeding to homework and carpooling were frequently laced with profanity. As her fame grew, so did the criticism, which accused her of poor parenting.

One of her Dooce postings mentioned a past success against drinking.

Armstrong was on Oprah and was named one of Forbes’ most powerful women in media.

“On October 8th, 2021, I celebrated six months of sobriety by myself on the floor next to my bed, feeling as if I were a wounded animal who wanted to be left alone to die,” Armstrong wrote. “No one in my life could comprehend how symbolic a victory it was for me, albeit… one fraught with tears and sobbing so violent that I thought my body would split in two at one point.” The anguish engulfed me in tidal waves of agony. It was difficult for me to breathe for a few hours.”

“Sobriety was not some mystery I had to solve,” she continued. It was simply examining my wounds and figuring out how to live with them.”

In her memoir, she detailed how her blog began as a method to share her pop culture opinions with distant pals. She wrote that her audience increased from a few acquaintances to thousands of strangers worldwide in a year.

Armstrong explained that she began writing about her personal life and, subsequently, an office job, and “how much I wanted to strangle my boss, often using words and phrases that would embarrass a sailor.”

Her boss discovered the website and fired her, she wrote. She pulled it down and restarted it six months later, writing about her new husband, Armstrong, and how unemployment caused them to relocate from Los Angeles to her mother’s basement in Utah.

She became pregnant very quickly. She said the pregnancy provided “an endless trove” of information, “but I truly believed that I would give it all up once I had the baby.”

She didn’t, but she did document her ups and downs as a new mother.

“I don’t think I would have survived it had I not offered up my story and reached out to bridge the loneliness,” she wrote.

Armstrong was raised in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but later renounced the faith. Her memoir states she suffered from persistent depression for much of her life. After her marriage fell apart in 2017, the online celebrity called “the queen of the mommy bloggers” by The New York Times Magazine saw her popularity plummet.

According to an interview she gave Vox, her depression worsened, prompting her to register for a clinical trial at the University of Utah’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. She was placed in a chemically induced coma for ten sessions for 15 minutes.

“I felt like life was not meant to be lived,” Armstrong told Vox. “When you’re desperate enough, you’ll try anything.” I believed my children deserved a happy, healthy mother, and I needed to know that I had exhausted all possibilities to provide it for them.”

SOURCE – (AP)