The “Dooce” author Heather Brooke Armstrong, who rose to fame in the early days of blogging, passed away on Tuesday. She was 47 years old. On Wednesday, her family posted on Instagram to share the news of her passing.
She committed suicide, her lover Pete Ashdown informed the Associated Press. “She recently had a relapse, and that’s what really sent her down. She stayed sober for more than 18 months before beginning to relapse. Then, in the previous month, Ashdown told AP, “she went full tilt.”
She had long written about her battles with severe depression and drinking. She was a flowing and honest writer. She had recently come under fire for using her blog dooce.com to spread anti-trans sentiments.
Here is a tweet relate to her death:
Heather Armstrong, an explosively popular writer who, under the name Dooce, gave millions of readers intimate glimpses of her joys and challenges in parenthood and marriage, as well as of her harrowing struggles with depression, has died at 47. https://t.co/ptxwZLRulr pic.twitter.com/qMXTrVLnZd
— The New York Times (@nytimes) May 10, 2023
On the dooce.com website, she has only left one post from April 6 in which she discusses the misery of her battle with alcohol. She commented, “Early sobriety resembles living life as a clam without its shell,” and went on to write extensively about her daughter and share music videos that had special value for her.
Despite using her married name Heather Armstrong for the majority of her professional life, Heather Hamilton had reverted to her maiden name. She earned the title of “queen of the mommy bloggers,” attracting a sizable readership from all over the nation. She was dismissed from her Los Angeles web development job in 2002 though, before she had kids, for blogging about her employer and coworkers.
The internet gave her termination for blogging the nickname “being “dooced,” which has now come to mean being fired for writing about a place of employment. She had earned the moniker “Dooce” from her coworkers due to a spelling error she made when writing “dude.”
Hamilton started writing on the ups and downs of parenthood and marriage after moving back to her hometown of Salt Lake City, where she had grown up. Dooce.com apparently had more than 8 million monthly visitors as blogs gained popularity and brought in more than $100,000 in revenue per year from adverts.
Although some readers objected to her use of her kids’ pictures and stories as blog content, she went on to become a well-known media personality. She appeared as a guest on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 2009 and was named one of Forbes’ most important women in media that same year. She later created branded material for other businesses, such as Ford, Nintendo, and Clorox.