"Heather Armstrong, the breakout star behind the website Dooce, who was hailed as the queen of the so-called mommy bloggers..."

"... for giving millions of readers intimate daily glimpses of her odyssey through parenthood and marriage, as well as her harrowing struggles with depression, died on Tuesday at her home in Salt Lake City. She was 47. Pete Ashdown, her longtime partner, who found her body in the home, said the cause was suicide."

The NYT reports.

"As the blogging boom approached its zenith in 2009, Ms. Armstrong was a blog powerhouse....  'I looked at myself as someone who happened to be able to talk about parenthood in a way many women wanted to be able to but were afraid to.'... The topics grew darker.... In 2009, Ms. Armstrong chronicled her struggle with postpartum depression.... Few readers were ready, however, when she and her husband....broke the news in 2012 that they were splitting. The breakup of the family outraged many Dooce loyalists, who had come to cherish her portrayal of a charmed marriage and family life. It also seemed to embolden the anonymous critics on internet forums who had long spewed hateful resentment over her seemingly idyllic life and financial success....."

ADDED: Here's Lyz Lenz, writing at WaPo:

Heather’s writing was sack-of-meat raw, raunchy and transcendently real. She wrote fiercely and furiously.... I read her obsessively.... It’s a testament to the intimacy of her writing that we all felt like we were her friends when all that held us together were the flimsy web created by words.... Reading Heather, I learned how to write with humor and heart and skin-peeling honesty. She was like the Hunter S. Thompson of birthing and child-rearing — a wild, weird gonzo journalist of domesticity and dog poop. 

She once described her sick toddler as acting like a “drunken blues singer whose wife done kicked him out of the house.” Writing about a visit to the gynecologist, she noted wryly, “Somewhere there has to be a Garfield comic that talks about how Mondays aren’t bad enough already, and here you have to go and throw an enlarged ovary into his soup?” Her post about getting shingles while breastfeeding was so epically hilarious that even now, nearly 14 years later, every time I hear the word “shingles” I see her saying it like a Broadway singer with jazz hands.... 

When Heather returned to blogging, she was a different kind of writer. I stopped reading her as regularly. She wrote a post that expressed anti-trans sentiment. Her writing about her eating disorder would often trigger my own....