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(CNN) — Heather Armstrong, an influential writer whose Dooce blog helped popularize mom blogs, has died, her partner, Pete Ashdown, confirmed to CNN. Armstrong was 47 years old.
Ashdown told the Associated Press that Armstrong, who also used her maiden name, Hamilton, committed suicide.
“Heather B. Hamilton [Armstrong] she was a brilliant, funny and compassionate writer who battled mental health and alcoholism,” Ashdown said in a statement to CNN. “She saved many lives through what she wrote about depression, but in the end she couldn’t save herself.”
“She was a loving companion and mother who was always open to a new adventure or gig. Heather believed that ending her life was wrong, but in the end, her judgment was clouded by alcohol. We loved her and will miss her dearly.”
Armstrong founded Dooce (named after an inside joke involving the word “friend,” according to The New York Times) in the early 2000s. He was first a container of complaints about work, his life after leaving the Mormon Church, and other daily musings, until in 2002 when she was fired from her job for writing about her co-workers using nicknames.
The layoff incident went viral, which, at the time, meant that Dooce was getting about 25,000 hits a day, according to the Times, and Dooce was well on his way to becoming a digital phenomenon. The word “dooce” even appeared in several digital dictionaries; According to Cambridge, being “dooce” means “losing your job because you wrote something bad about it on a blog.”
Armstrong’s blog’s popularity skyrocketed again after she began writing about her children, Leta and Marlo, documenting the trials of young motherhood and raising two children. In 2004, Dooce became the first personal website to start accepting a significant number of paid ads, The New York Times said. And by 2009, Armstrong was having 8.5 million readers a month, Vox reported, in 2019. (She also appeared on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” in 2009; both women were named two of Forbes’ 30 Most Influential Women. in the media that year).
Armstrong never shied away from sharing hard truths with his readers, whether it was about his children’s tantrums or his mental health issues. She was open about her experiences with postpartum depression after the birth of her eldest child, and even wrote a memoir on the subject, in 2009, called “I Sucked and Then I Cried,” one of four books she has published. She published.
Her honesty was part of the appeal: even seemingly trivial snapshots of her daily life could captivate readers.
“She has the ability to take a single episode and turn it into an epic, and then if you go word for word and ask, ‘What did she reveal?’ it’s not really much,” her ex-husband Jon Armstrong, who helped run Dooce in her early days, told the Times in 2011.
The couple announced their divorce in 2012 in separate blog posts.
After her depression worsened, Armstrong stopped blogging from 2015 to 2017. She met Ashdown and moved in with him. The name of Ashdown, a former Democratic candidate for the US Senate, was also on Dooce.
Towards the end of her life, Armstrong was characteristically candid with readers about her struggle with alcoholism. Her candor inspired her readers and fellow writers of hers, who remembered her influence on her work and her complicated personality.
“Calling Dooce a blogger mom was always an inadequate description of her breadth, her style, and her early influence on blogging,” tweeted The New York Times reporter Katie Rogers.
The author Lyz Lenz graded Armstrong’s writing as “raw, revealing and so momentously real” and said that reading Dooce gave her the confidence to launch her own writing career.
“Heather Armstrong was one of the first writers to show me that I didn’t have to wait to get published,” Lenz wrote. “That I could be fun and fierce and free and write on my own terms. What a loss this is!”
