"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....
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24 comments:
I only know her from the NYT obit. Sad story. Perhaps she was made that way. Her depression was not the result of divorce or childbirth but because she was not wired to see things on the white light sprectrum. According to the obit, a lot of things went right in her life. She was attractive and made a lot of money. She got fired and achieved fame and fortune by writing about being fired. You couldn't ask the genie to fulfill a more satisfying wish but that moment of joy and triumph was fleeting........Some people are destined to be unhappy no matter what cards they're dealt. If they're dealt the high cards those cards just serve to remind them of how unworthy they are of their good fortune...From the obit, she sounds like a good person who could never convince her enemy of her true worth.
"She was 47. Pete Ashdown, her longtime partner, who found her body in the home, said the cause was suicide."
No need to wait for the coroner's report I guess.
So this so-called friend Lyz Lenz dumped her when Heather Armstrong wrote an anti-trans post and now she libels the dead. Some friend. What a piece of shit.
Selfish. She left behind her children - who will now be without a mom.
Seeking attention is often a sign of mental weakness.
" I stopped reading her as regularly. She wrote a post that expressed anti-trans sentiment."
I'm amazed at how triggered some people are about the whole trans thing. These are the people who shun J.K. Rowling, in effect punishing people who stray from groupthink. Sad in so many ways.
It's telling to see how shallow and quickly discarded the WaPo writer's attachment was. The WaPo writer "felt like they were friends" but dumped her as soon as she was no longer entertaining and began needing support (not to mention expressing unorthodoxy). I can see how that would be wearing upon a blogger of a depressive turn of mind, knowing that her readers were expecting intimacy but giving nothing back.
I've never heard of the late Heather Armstrong before, and the Wapo writer who was so taken by her didn't give me any clear picture of her, unfortunately. For all the feisty-type adjectives, many of them on the tired side of vocabulary, nothing too clear came through to me. The writer's sense of historical time seemed a bit born-yesterday, too. Hero-worship is hard to put aside for accurate description. Even hero worship tempered by its object having a politically incorrect view on the trans prerequisite.
I read dooce for over 20 years. She was a fascinating person who suffered greatly.
I read the news this morning and am stunned at how much it has affected me all day. Feels like the loss of an old friend. I never would have anticipated having this reaction.
Rip Heather
I never read her and now I probably never will. A light has gone out of the world. Prayers up.
What is really bad about the internet is how viciously people attack others for who they are or what their choices are. It's one thing to call someone out for advocating bad things, but not ok to attack them for their politics, personal life choices, or circumstances. The ugly side of humanity comes out in the internet.
Pretty sad. All those followers, very few friends?
I don't remember ever hearing of her or reading her blog. I can imagine, though, that if I were writing about motherhood it would be a lot easier when kids are little. Once they start to grow they're people whose privacy you're invading. If my children were my blogging material it would poison everything about family and home life. Every personal event would need to be mined for material.
May her family find peace and comfort.
My wife used to be a regular reader of Dooce and would tell me about the various drama going on. She apparently stopped reading a while ago--I told her this news yesterday and she had not heard.
A sad end; I feel bad for her children and family.
I hadn't seen her work before. Now I have. RIP Ms. Armstrong, well done.
One of the problems with the internet is being who you aren't. For many, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, seem to be about presenting an idyllic image that is hard to meet IRL.
---"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....."
Those two sentences tell me that the "critics" who "spewed hateful resentment" may have been the more astute readers of the blog and understood that the image was not the reality.
Writers always make up their own personae; it's unavoidable.
Making this observation is not passing judgment on the authoress herself. Never heard of her or "Dooce" before, and her life obviously had its challenges. Her partner seems to make it clearer than either of the other accounts that alcoholism played a major role too. It could have served both as a flight from depression and a contributor to it.
"Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad."
I read Dooce longer than I’ve read Althouse (maybe by a year or two?), and that’s saying something. I started reading her in 2004 or 2005, long after she went viral for being fired, but shortly after her first was born. I followed her regularly for about a decade, and off and on in the past few years.
That lady got me to write. She inspired me and my little blog (and MySpace, do date and age myself!) that probably had all of a few dozen posts and maybe one dozen followers. She taught me that any story, no matter how mundane, could be funny. I’m not an excellent writer, but I do okay, and what little talent I have I attribute largely to reading her blog. When my daughter died in 2015, I wrote something on Facebook that went viral and gained me a modest following. Heather had taught me many years before that it was okay to be real, raw, emotional, and talk about the darkest parts of yourself and your experience, and that’s exactly what I did in those first few years of grief. Many - especially other grieving parents - thanked me for being so open and honest. But they should have first thanked Heather for teaching me how.
Dooce will be missed.
I thought I'd submitted a comment criticizing the WaPo writer's coldness. Maybe it didn't make the cut.
It is very sad, although not surprising, and who knows how much of her pain was exacerbated, rather than ameliorated, by living life online, something that for her involved not only being so open about her own struggles, but putting her family and personal life online.
(I don't know if you ever noted it, but a couple of months ago, another Very Online Person - Dave Hollis, ex-husband of megainfluencer Rachel Hollis, died, coroner's report says, due to a variety of substances in his body....)
Anyway, the "anti-trans" post that Heather published is here and, in light of her suicide, painful to read, but I think, important. Her daughter had declared herself "non-binary" and Heather goes on a *tear* about the whole ideology and scene, astutely connecting it to her own body image struggles.
(The photos on the post are horrifying, really)
https://archive.is/GxIV3
"When I was your age I was angry at everything and everyone, and if I had thought that testosterone would make me feel better about how skinny I was or wasn’t, how curvy I was or wasn’t, how a pair of jeans never fit my body the way they fit the bodies of supermodels I had hanging all over my walls, I would have injected testosterone into my arms like heroin.
Instead, I did was de rigeueur at the time. I tried to control what I put in my body. I tried to control the way I looked.
When we shackle ourselves to an idea of happiness, and that idea can look like anything — a thin body, a man’s body — we blind ourselves to a million instances of happiness that don’t look like that image. We are shackling ourselves to a life of constant suicidal ideation that is in no way temporary.
When I stopped drinking I returned to that eating disorder only this time I had Adderall. I had developed a whole new league of eating disorder. Let’s call it Anorexia on Speed.
That’s how fucking serious I am.
I want you to memorize this phrase and repeat it
Suicide is a permanent fix to a temporary problem.
Moms, and more specifically WHITE PROGRESSIVE MOMS, you know exactly who you are because you want to be the fun mom, they need you to knock off your bullshit.
Stop playing into this nonsense because you are helping them destroy their lives."
Bolded line: so sad.
It is very sad, although not surprising, and who knows how much of her pain was exacerbated, rather than ameliorated, by living life online, something that for her involved not only being so open about her own struggles, but putting her family and personal life online.
(I don't know if you ever noted it, but a couple of months ago, another Very Online Person - Dave Hollis, ex-husband of megainfluencer Rachel Hollis, died, coroner's report says, due to a variety of substances in his body....)
Anyway, the "anti-trans" post that Heather published is here and, in light of her suicide, painful to read, but I think, important. Her daughter had declared herself "non-binary" and Heather goes on a *tear* about the whole ideology and scene, astutely connecting it to her own body image struggles.
(The photos on the post are horrifying, really)
https://archive.is/GxIV3
"When I was your age I was angry at everything and everyone, and if I had thought that testosterone would make me feel better about how skinny I was or wasn’t, how curvy I was or wasn’t, how a pair of jeans never fit my body the way they fit the bodies of supermodels I had hanging all over my walls, I would have injected testosterone into my arms like heroin.
Instead, I did was de rigeueur at the time. I tried to control what I put in my body. I tried to control the way I looked.
When we shackle ourselves to an idea of happiness, and that idea can look like anything — a thin body, a man’s body — we blind ourselves to a million instances of happiness that don’t look like that image. We are shackling ourselves to a life of constant suicidal ideation that is in no way temporary.
When I stopped drinking I returned to that eating disorder only this time I had Adderall. I had developed a whole new league of eating disorder. Let’s call it Anorexia on Speed.
That’s how fucking serious I am.
I want you to memorize this phrase and repeat it
Suicide is a permanent fix to a temporary problem.
Moms, and more specifically WHITE PROGRESSIVE MOMS, you know exactly who you are because you want to be the fun mom, they need you to knock off your bullshit.
Stop playing into this nonsense because you are helping them destroy their lives."
Bolded line: so sad.
Amazing how often artistic creativity goes hand in hand with mental illness.
Reporting killers who killed themselves with use of the passive and sympathetic "died" only encourages others to do the same.
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