Heather Armstrong, known as Dooce to fans, dead at 47
Armstrong died by suicide, her boyfriend Pete Ashdown told The Associated Press, saying he found her Tuesday night at their Salt Lake City home.
The pioneering mommy blogger Heather Armstrong, who laid bare her struggles as a mother and her battles with depression and alcoholism on her site Dooce.com and on social media, has died at 47.
Armstrong, who had two children with her former husband and business partner, Jon Armstrong, began Dooce in 2001 and built it into a lucrative career.
She was one of the first and most popular mommy bloggers, writing frankly about her children, relationships and other challenges.
She parlayed her successes with the blog, on Instagram and elsewhere into book deals, putting out a memoir in 2009
“It Sucked and then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown and a Much Needed Margarita.”
Armstrong appeared on Oprah and was on the Forbes list of most influential women in media.
In 2012, the Armstrongs announced they were separating. They divorced later that year. She began dating Ashdown, a former U.S. senate candidate, nearly six years ago.
They lived together with Armstrong’s children, 19-year-old Leta and 13-year-old Marlo. He has three children from a previous marriage who spent time in their home as well.
Armstrong didn’t hold back on Instagram and Dooce, the latter a name that arose from her inability to quickly spell “dude” during online chats.
Her raw, unapologetic posts on everything from pregnancy and breastfeeding to homework and carpooling were often infused with curses.
As her popularity grew, so too did the barbs of critics, who accused her of bad parenting and worse.
In her memoir, she described how her blog began as a way to share her thoughts on pop culture with faraway friends.
Within a year, her audience grew from a few friends to thousands of strangers around the world, she wrote.
More and more, Armstrong said, she found herself writing about her personal life and, eventually, an office job
and “how much I wanted to strangle my boss, often using words and phrases that would embarrass a sailor.”
Her employer found the site and fired her, she wrote. She took it down but started back up again six months later
writing about her new husband, Armstrong, and how unemployment had forced them to move from Los Angeles to her mother’s basement in Utah.
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