Armstrong used to be born on July 19, 1975, and grew up in Memphis, prior to majoring in English at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. She graduated in 1997 and moved to Los Angeles for paintings prior to marrying a internet dressmaker named Jon Armstrong and returning to Salt Lake City.
She based the weblog Dooce in 2001. It briefly gathered a devoted following of younger moms who discovered Armstrong’s candid and deeply non-public posts concerning the realities of motherhood fascinating.
“She was a transformative figure not just in the parenting and family space, but in what we now take for granted in terms of the digital ecosystem,” mentioned Catherine Connors, the senior vp of author reviews at the promoting company Raptive and a former blogger. “She was one of the first well known bloggers in any category and had an absolutely radical impact when she began writing honestly about motherhood and her mental health issues.”
Armstrong detailed her struggles with postpartum melancholy, her conflicted feelings about parenting, her battles with alcoholism, her marriage, and eventual divorce. She broke taboos about faith, detailing her selection to depart the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Her demise used to be introduced on her Instagram web page Wednesday.
Armstrong is credited by means of many with upending a girls’s media global that till the early 2000s in large part portrayed an idealized model of motherhood, a time when house lifestyles used to be regarded as personal, and problems associated with circle of relatives and kids have been deemed too non-public to speak about publicly.
Mommy bloggers, maximum significantly Armstrong, modified that, mentioned Connors. In the pre running a blog technology, she mentioned, “You got really sanitized parenting magazines and baby books and things that did not tell you the truth about the experience of motherhood. … The whole domain of media around parenting was male dominated and when it focused on women it was sanitized. … [Armstrong] used her platform to completely destigmatize issues like postpartum depression, divorce, and all these things we totally take for granted now.”
The time period “mommy blogger” that used to be bestowed on Armstrong and plenty of different girls bloggers at the time used to be fraught, with many ladies feeling adore it used to be misogynistic and pejorative. But Armstrong shattered the ones perceptions. Blogging gave girls an area the place they may talk for themselves and construct audiences out of doors company media.
When Armstrong made up our minds to run advertisements on her weblog in 2004, she was probably the most first to monetize a private logo on the web, paving the best way for generations of influencers to practice.
“It was empowering,” she advised Vox in 2019, “because I realized I didn’t need some male executive in New York to tell me that my story’s important enough to publish because I can just do it myself.”
In 2009, Armstrong wrote a guide known as, “It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita.” That 12 months, she gave the impression as a visitor on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” and used to be named probably the most influential lady in media by means of Forbes. In 2012, she launched her 2nd guide titled, “Dear Daughter.”
At one level, Armstrong’s weblog used to be reportedly attracting greater than 8 million audience a month and her income from it totaled $30,000 to $50,000 a month.
“Every influencer, every family channel, every monetized site trying to maintain an existence as a form of independent media can trace its history back to Dooce,” the blogger referred to as SB Sarah wrote on Wednesday. “She was more famous than the biggest channels on TikTok, more famous than the YouTubers with the most subscribers, more relevant at the time than any Instagrammer — without any of those forms of social media to build her audience and her community.”
Armstrong and her mommy running a blog friends constructed the root for what is referred to now because the author financial system.
“She shaped the internet as we know it today — and launched a million storytellers with her willingness to write boldly and unapologetically about the struggles of being human,” the blogger Rebecca Wolf, every other pioneering motherhood blogger, wrote of Armstrong’s passing on Wednesday.
Kathryn Jezer-Morton, a author who chronicles motherhood and the net global, mentioned that Armstrong’s have an effect on at the fashionable web is “hard to overstate.” “She was saying things no one had said out loud before,” mentioned Jezer-Morton. “She was really honest about who she was and we hadn’t seen that before from a suburban mom, it was unprecedented.”
It’s stunning to listen to Heather Armstrong died the previous day. It’s laborious to position into phrases simply how influential she used to be to the blogosphere. I’m hoping she is at peace, and that her kids and family members are discovering solace the place they are able to.
— roxane homosexual (@rgay) May 10, 2023
The prominence of Armstrong’s weblog additionally kicked off what would change into a countrywide dialogue at the function of kids in parenting content material on-line.
“There was one time when she wrote about when I was sick and it kind of embarrassed me and I talked to her about it and she was like, ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to embarrass you,’” her then 14-year-old daughter, Leta Elise Armstrong, advised Slate in 2018. Her daughter mentioned she used to be given veto energy over positive issues showing on Dooce.com.
Armstrong wrote broadly about her struggles with melancholy and alcohol dependancy in her 2019 book, “The Valedictorian of Being Dead.” The guide main points her enjoy present process a medical trial for a remedy for melancholy that subjected her to ten periods by which medical doctors used propofol anesthesia to scale back her mind job to 0 prior to elevating it once more.
Following the remedy and the newsletter of her guide, she started running a blog extra continuously on Dooce.com. Her ultimate post, dated April 6, 2023, talks about her struggles with sobriety and melancholy. “Early sobriety resembles living life as a clam without its shell,” she wrote.
She is survived by means of her two kids, Leta Elise Armstrong, now 19, and Marlo Iris Armstrong, 14.