Pioneering Mommy Blogger Heather Armstrong Dead At 47

SALT LAKE CITY, UT — Heather Armstrong, the pioneering mom blogger who shared her struggles as a parent and her battles with depression and alcoholism on her site Dooce.com and on social media, has died, her boyfriend told The Associated Press. She was 47.

Armstrong was found dead at the Salt Lake City home she shares with her boyfriend, Pete Ashdown, who told AP she died by suicide. Armstrong had been sober for more than 18 months but recently relapsed, Ashdown said.

She had two children with her former husband and business partner and had built a lucrative career from her online presence as one of the first and most popular bloggers in the parenting space. Armstrong parlayed her successes with the blog, on Instagram and elsewhere into book deals, putting out a memoir in 2009, “It Sucked and then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown and a Much Needed Margarita.”

In 2012, the Armstrongs announced they were separating. They divorced later that year. Armstrong began dating Ashdown, a former U.S. senate candidate, nearly six years ago. They lived together with Armstrong’s children, 19-year-old Leta and 13-year-old Marlo. He has three children from a previous marriage who spent time in their home as well.

"Heather Brooke Hamilton aka Heather B. Armstrong aka dooce aka love of my life. July 19, 1975 - May 9, 2023. 'It takes an ocean not to break.' Hold your loved ones close and love everyone else," Ashdown wrote in an Instagram post shared on Heather's account Wednesday.

In her memoir, Armstrong described how her blog began as a way to share her thoughts on pop culture with faraway friends. Within a year, her audience grew from a few friends to thousands of strangers around the world, she wrote. At its peak, Dooce had more than 8 million monthly readers.

Armstrong was raised in Memphis, Tennessee, in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints but left the faith after graduating from Brigham Young University and moving to Los Angeles.

"I suffer from chronic anxiety and depression, and I believe it started manifesting itself when I was in high school, maybe earlier," Armstrong wrote in a 2007 blog post. "I didn’t seek treatment, however, until my sophomore year in college when I was on the brink of dropping out, when I finally called my father and exposed a very dark side of me, explained that I did not have the ability to cope no matter how hard I prayed or tried to get over it."

In 2017, after the unraveling of her marriage, the internet star dubbed “the queen of the mommy bloggers” by The New York Times Magazine took a tumble in popularity as social media came into its own.

Her depression grew worse, leading her to enroll in a clinical trial at the University of Utah’s Neuropsychiatric Institute. She was put in a chemically induced coma for 15 minutes at a time for 10 sessions.

“I was feeling like life was not meant to be lived,” Armstrong told Vox. “When you are that desperate, you will try anything. I thought my kids deserved to have a happy, healthy mother, and I needed to know that I had tried all options to be that for them.”

In 2019, she wrote her third book, “The Valedictorian of Being Dead: The True Story of Dying Ten Times to Live,” about her experiences with the treatment.

Armstrong attributed, in part, some of her past emotional spirals to sharing her life online for so long.

“The hate was very, very scary and very, very hard to live through,” she said in the interview. “It gets inside your head and eats away at your brain. It became untenable.”

Armstrong's supporters have shared tributes online in the wake of her death, writing that through her willingness to share the most vulnerable moments of her life, Armstrong built a community of people who she moved and inspired.

"It's hard to put into words just how influential she was to the blogosphere," author Roxane Gay wrote in a tweet Wednesday.

Writer and chef Luisa Weiss wrote in an Instagram comment under Heather's final Instagram post "I can close my eyes and instantly summon up countless images, both literal and figurative, that [Heather] shared on her blog so many years ago. I read it passionately, carefully, in awe of the person who seemed so brave and loud and unafraid, who was able to write about things no one else was writing about, who was beautiful and proud and smart and funny."

In a Romper op-ed, writer Elizabeth Angell wrote that she "[lives] in the world that Heather Armstrong made."

"Anyone who writes about parenting today does," Angell added. "Her writing — discursive, personal, funny as hell — lit up the internet ... I shared that deep sense of connection with hundreds of thousands of other readers whose own birth experiences, family lives, divorces, and mental health struggles made them feel so close to her."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

If you are having suicidal thoughts, dial 988 for the National Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.