NEW YORK — The pioneering mommy blogger Heather Armstrong, who laid naked her struggles as a mom and her battles with melancholy and alcoholism on her web site Dooce.com and on social media, has died at 47.
Armstrong died by suicide, her boyfriend Pete Ashdown informed The Related Press, saying he discovered her Tuesday night time at their Salt Lake Metropolis house.
Ashdown stated Armstrong had been sober for over 18 months however had just lately had a relapse. He didn’t present additional particulars.
Armstrong, who had two youngsters together with her former husband and enterprise companion, Jon Armstrong, started Dooce in 2001 and constructed it right into a profitable profession. She was one of many first and hottest mommy bloggers, writing frankly about her youngsters, relationships and different challenges.
She parlayed her successes with the weblog, on Instagram and elsewhere into guide offers, placing out a memoir in 2009, “It Sucked after which I Cried: How I Had a Child, a Breakdown and a A lot Wanted Margarita.”
Armstrong appeared on Oprah and was on the Forbes checklist of most influential girls in media.
In 2012, the Armstrongs introduced they have been separating. They divorced later that 12 months. She started relationship Ashdown, a former U.S. Senate candidate, practically six years in the past. They lived along with Armstrong’s youngsters, 19-year-old Leta and 13-year-old Marlo. He has three youngsters from a earlier marriage who hung out of their house as effectively.
Armstrong didn’t maintain again on Instagram and Dooce, the latter a reputation that arose from her incapacity to shortly spell “dude” throughout on-line chats. Her uncooked, unapologetic posts on all the pieces from being pregnant and breastfeeding to homework and carpooling have been usually infused with curses. As her reputation grew, so too did the barbs of critics, who accused her of dangerous parenting and worse.
Considered one of her posts on Dooce spoke of a earlier victory over ingesting.
“On Oct. 8, 2021 I celebrated six months of sobriety on my own on the ground subsequent to my mattress feeling as if I have been a wounded animal who wished to be left alone to die,” Armstrong wrote. “There was nobody in my life who may probably comprehend how symbolic a victory it was for me, albeit … one fraught with tears and sobbing so violent that at one level I believed my physique would cut up in two. The grief submerged me in tidal waves of ache. For a number of hours I discovered it onerous to breathe.”
She went on: “Sobriety was not some thriller I needed to resolve. It was merely taking a look at all my wounds and studying easy methods to dwell with them.”
In her memoir, she described how her weblog started as a method to share her ideas on popular culture with faraway mates. Inside a 12 months, her viewers grew from a number of mates to 1000’s of strangers all over the world, she wrote.
Increasingly, Armstrong stated, she discovered herself writing about her private life and, finally, an workplace job, and “how a lot I wished to strangle my boss, usually utilizing phrases and phrases that may embarrass a sailor.”
Her employer discovered the positioning and fired her, she wrote. She took it down however began again up once more six months later, writing about her new husband, Armstrong, and the way unemployment had pressured them to maneuver from Los Angeles to her mom’s basement in Utah.
She was quickly pregnant. The being pregnant supplied “an countless trove” of content material, she wrote, “however I really believed that I’d give all of it up as soon as I had the newborn.”
She didn’t, however chronicled her highs and lows as a brand new mom.
“I don’t assume I’d have survived it had I not supplied up my story and reached out to bridge the loneliness,” she wrote.
Armstrong was raised within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints however left the faith years in the past. She suffered power melancholy for a lot of her life, in line with her guide. In 2017, after the unravelling of her marriage, the web star dubbed “the queen of the mommy bloggers” by The New York Instances Journal took a tumble in reputation.
Her melancholy grew worse, main her to enrol in a scientific trial on the College of Utah’s Neuropsychiatric Institute, in line with an interview she gave Vox. She was put in a chemically induced coma for quarter-hour at a time for 10 classes.
“I used to be feeling like life was not meant to be lived,” Armstrong informed Vox. “If you find yourself that determined, you’ll attempt something. I believed my youngsters deserved to have a cheerful, wholesome mom, and I wanted to know that I had tried all choices to be that for them.”
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