American breakout blogging star remembered by a generation of women who followed her truthful daily updates way before it was cool to talk poop and post-partum depression. And make money of it
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I owe Heather Armstrong big time.
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Long before there were “influencers” and “authenticity” and “vulnerability”, there was Dooce.com.
For a new mother in 2009, who had been made redundant at her newspaper job, it was Heather Armstrong’s blog that showed me that motherhood does not “make it all go away”. That the loneliness of motherhood is real and far from the airbrushed, bubble-wrapped bullshit they want you to believe.
It was the year when Dooce.com (a blog she started in 2001) was at its zenith. She shared the banalities and tribulations of motherhood and parenting, chronicled her own struggle with depression, and showed me that being angry/sad/clueless/less than perfect about stuff does not make me less of a mother. Incidentally, Armstrong’s posts about her employers at her day job got her fired when they got wind of it. “Dooced” was soon a verb and trendier than “googled”.
So thank you, Armstrong, for keeping me angry enough to write a book about pregnancy and motherhood and start my own blog journey. It helped me “put my thoughts somewhere” and find my people.
When Armstrong appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2009, Dooce had a monthly 8.5 million readers. The blog was reportedly earning as much as $40,000 a month in ads and that’s not even counting the revenue from her books—huge speaking fees and the contracts she signed to promote Verizon and appear on HGTV. According to Nielsen estimates, Dooce sometimes had as many as six million visitors a month.
“I looked at myself as someone who happened to be able to talk about parenthood in a way that many women wanted to be able to but were afraid to,” Armstrong had said then. She made a path for so many women writing about motherhood—Scary Mommy, Jezebel, Mighty Girl, Renegade Mothering, Pioneer Woman, among others.
Her posts on mental health began with the extended post-partum depression that she experienced after the birth of her first daughter, Leta. She wrote honestly about it and also got a book deal—It Sucked and then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown and a Much Needed Margarita became a bestseller and paved the way for two more books. Her participation in experimental treatment for depression involving 10 rounds of a chemically- induced coma approximating brain death took the shape of The Valedictorian of Being Dead: The True Story of Dying Ten Times to Live.
In one of her posts on February 10, 2004, she wrote: “There are really good days, days when I feel strong enough to handle this, days when I look at the future ahead of us and I get excited about the ride. On good days I can go several hours without crying. And then there are bad days, days when I can’t see ever leaving the house again, days when I think that by the time I do leave the house again my hair will be past my waistline because how can I ever get my hair cut when the baby needs to be fed every 2.5 hours? On bad days I think I’ll never be able to walk the dog again, I’ll never go shopping again, I’ll never see a movie in a movie theatre again. On bad days, I cry all day long.”
In 2009, Forbes named Armstrong one of its 30 most influential women in media, alongside Winfrey, Arianna Huffington, and Tyra Banks. The New York Times Magazine crowned her the “queen of the mommy bloggers”. She had a huge fan following, but she also attracted an army of haters, who flooded her with hostile comments, hate mail, smear campaigns and even death threats.
Armstrong being Armstrong turned it into a living, by posting her hate mail on Dooce, and inviting readers to scroll through. Page views grew exponentially.
In the past few years, she wrote mainly about her struggles with alcoholism: “Sobriety was not some mystery I had to solve. It was simply looking at all my wounds and learning how to live with them.”
But her willingness to discuss the mess and chaos of her life in a voice that was raw, arch, vulnerable and often funny, opened the door for others to do the same, yours truly included. Armstrong taught me that if I used my voice in honest, thoughtful, authentic narratives of my life, perhaps other women could read and rally around it.
I cannot imagine what you were going through, Heather, when you decided to end your life, but I know this: However public your voice on motherhood, marriage and mental health must have been, the reality is far grim, and far harder to find a palate for.
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