Heather Armstrong, the blogger who found success documenting her struggles of motherhood on her website Dooce, has died. She was 47.
According to the BBC, her partner Pete Ashdown found her body in their Salt Lake home. Ms Armstrong was dubbed the “queen of mommy blogging” for giving glimpses into her journey as a mother, struggles with depression and marriage. At the time of its peak popularity, Dooce received more than eight million visitors a month, the outlet further said quoting a Vox report.
In 2009, she was in the Forbes list of 30 most influential women in media. Ms Armstrong also released her first book in the same year and appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show. In 2012, she released her second book titled ‘Dear Daughter’.
The Wall Street Journal said in an old article that by 2009, the zenith of the blogging boom, Ms Armstrong’s blog may have generated $40,000 a month in revenue from paid advertising.
She started the blog after being fired from her job as a web designer in Los Angeles in 2002. The reason was a sarcastic blog in which she gave co-workers nicknames like That One Co-worker Who Manages to Say Something Stupid Every Time He Opens His Mouth was found to be hers.
The New York Times (NYT) said that the name of her website was inspired by a popular internet phrase ‘Dooced’, which refers to a person who has been fired because of what he/she wrote on a website or blog.
“I cried in my exit interview. My boss, who served as the subject of some of my more vicious posts, sat across the table from me unable to look me in the face, she was so hurt. I had never felt like such a horrible human being, even though in my mind I thought that I was just being creative and funny,” she said in an interview, as per NYT.
Ms Armstrong was born Heather Brooke Hamilton, and was raised in Bartlett, Tennessee, a suburb of Memphis, and later based in Salt Lake City.