Heather Armstrong, ‘Queen of the Mommy Bloggers,’ Is Dead at 47
Heather Armstrong, an explosively popular web writer and entrepreneur who, with her website Dooce, was hailed as the queen of the so-called mommy bloggers for giving millions of readers intimate glimpses of her joys and challenges in parenthood and marriage, as well as of her harrowing struggles with depression, died on Tuesday at her home in Salt Lake City. She was 47.
Her death was announced on her Instagram channel. Pete Ashdown, her longtime partner, said the cause was suicide. He said he had found her body in the home.
Ms. Armstrong, a lapsed Mormon from Salt Lake City, rose to prominence at the dawn of the personal blog craze of the early 2000s. Her baptism in the field came after she graduated from Brigham Young University in 1997 and moved to Los Angeles, where she taught herself HTML code and took a job at a tech company.
She started dooce.com in 2001, christening it with the nickname she had earned after committing a typo writing the word “dude” in an AOL Instant Messenger chat with friends, according to one of her stories.
Source: The New York Times
