Heather Armstrong, 'queen of the mummy bloggers', dies

Heather Armstrong, ‘queen of the mummy bloggers’, dies

May 11, 2023

Heather Armstrong, who found success and millions of fans with her “mummy blog” Dooce, has died at the age of 47.

Her boyfriend Pete Ashdown found her on Tuesday night at their Salt Lake City home, he told The Associated Press news agency.

Ms Armstrong was one of the first and most popular so-called “mummy bloggers”, who wrote frankly about her children, relationships and struggles with alcohol and depression.

Mr Ashdown said his partner took her own life, having recently suffered a relapse after being sober for 18 months.

She started her blog, Dooce – the name was a riff on her inability to quickly spell “dude” during online chats – in 2002, during the early rise of blogging.

At its peak, Dooce had more than eight million monthly readers and Ms Armstrong was dubbed “the queen of the mommy bloggers” by The New York Times Magazine.

Through her blogging she gained a large following on Instagram and translated her success online into book deals, publishing her memoir in 2009 – It Sucked And Then I Cried: How I Had A Baby, A Breakdown And A Much Needed Margarita.

The same year, Ms Armstrong appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and was on the Forbes list of the most influential women in media.

In her memoir, she described how her blog began as a way to share her thoughts on pop culture and quickly grew to have a global audience.

She wrote about her office job for a tech start-up – and “how much I wanted to strangle my boss” – before her employer found the site and fired her.

After a six-month hiatus, she returned to the blog and pivoted to writing about pregnancy and parenting as she became a mother.

She suffered chronic depression for much of her life but wasn’t diagnosed and treated until college, according to her book.

Her depression grew worse in 2016 and she joined a clinical trial that involved being put in a chemically induced coma for 15 minutes at a time.

In an interview with Vox, she said: “When you are that desperate, you will try anything. I thought my kids deserved to have a happy, healthy mother, and I needed to know that I had tried all options to be that for them.”

Ms Armstrong is survived by her ex-husband Jon, her daughter Leta, 19, and her son Marlo, 14, as well as her boyfriend Mr Ashdown and his three children from a previous marriage.

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