Heather Armstrong, the breakout star behind the website Dooce, who was hailed as the queen of the so-called mommy bloggers has passed on at the age of 47.
She is popular known for giving millions of readers intimate daily glimpses of her odyssey through parenthood and marriage, as well as her harrowing struggles with depression, died on Tuesday at her home in Salt Lake City.
She was fired from a dot-com job for making indiscreet comments about her company online, she created, under the name Dooce, a hugely popular, moneymaking blog about parenthood and marriage.
Ms Armstrong who gained widespread recognition for detailing the ups and downs of parenthood on her blogging site Dooce, was found dead after police officers from Salt Lake City PD responded to a call.
A preliminary investigation determined she died by suicide. No other details were given.
Her boyfriend Pete Ashdown told the Associated Press he had found Ms Armstrong on Tuesday night in their Utah home.
She had two children with her former husband and business partner, Jon Armstrong.
Heather 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.
It led to a 2009 memoir, ‘It Sucked and then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown and a Much Needed Margarita’.
The same year, Ms Armstrong was named in Forbes’ annual list of the 30 most influential women in media.
At the height of its popularity, Dooce received more than eight million visitors a month, and her earnings from it totaled $30,000 to $50,000 each month.
In 2019, she published ‘The Valedictorian of Being Dead,’ a haunting recollection of her many attempted therapies 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.
‘When you want to be dead, there’s nothing quite like being dead.’
Ms. Armstrong’s efforts to find peace continued. In a post on Dooce last month, she recounted her turn to sobriety in recent years, writing that ’22 years of agony I had numbed with alcohol had come alive and transformed itself into an almost alien life form.’
Comparing the experience to shock from electrocution, she wrote, ‘I was forced to stare this wild-eyed savage straight in the face, and now I look around and think, “Oh, this. This is just life. All of this is just a physical reaction to psychological pain.’”
‘Sobriety was not some mystery I had to solve,’ she added. ‘It was simply looking at all my wounds and learning how to live with them.’
