Heather Armstrong, who found success and millions of fans with her “mummy blog” Dooce, has died at the age of 47.
Her boyfriend Pete Ashdown found her Tuesday night at their Salt Lake City home, she told the Associated Press news agency.
Ms. Armstrong was one of the first and most famous so-called “mummy bloggers,” writing candidly about her children, relationships, and struggles with alcohol and depression.
Mr Ashdown said his partner took her own life, having recently suffered a relapse after being sober for 18 months.
He started his blog, Dooce—the name was a riff on his inability to quickly type “dude” while chatting online—in 2002, during the early rise of blogging.
At her peak, Dooce had more than eight million monthly readers, and Ms. Armstrong was dubbed “the queen of mom bloggers” by The New York Times Magazine.
Through her blog she gained a large following on Instagram and translated her online success into book deals, releasing her memoir in 2009 – It Sucked And Then I Cried: How I Had A Baby, A Breakdown And A Much Needed margaritas.
The same year, Ms. Armstrong appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and was on Forbes’ list of the most influential women in media.
In her memoir, she described how her blog began as a way to share her thoughts on pop culture and quickly grew to have a global audience.
She wrote about her desk job for a tech start-up — and “how I wanted to strangle my boss” — before her employer found the site and fired her.
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After a six-month hiatus, she returned to blogging and dedicated herself to writing about pregnancy and parenting as she became a mother.
She suffered from chronic depression most of her life, but it wasn’t diagnosed and treated until college, according to her book.
Her depression worsened in 2016 and she joined a clinical trial that involved being put into a chemically induced coma for 15 minutes at a time.
In an interview with Vox, she said, “When you’re this desperate, you’ll try anything. I thought my kids deserved to have a happy, healthy mother, and I needed to know that I’d tried every option to be that way for them. “
Mrs Armstrong is survived by her ex-husband Jon, her daughter Leta, 19, and her son Marlo, 14, as well as her boyfriend Mr Ashdown and her three children from a previous marriage.
