This isn’t about romance or the reading community, but this here is still a blog, and it wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t read Dooce, the blog written by Heather Armstrong, back in the early days of the internet. I spend a fair amount of time looking back on the site and its history, and how romance readership and its communities have changed, and Dooce is tangled up in so much of that history for me. I can’t fully articulate the complicated feelings I have about Heather’s death, which was announced on her Instagram this morning.
If I look in reverse chronological order, her positive influence for me ended ages ago, but I can’t deny how much her blog shaped my life. Recently, she was posting more TERFy screeds and prior to that turn, I read her child Leta’s words on Slate in 2018 and had a fair amount of regret for how much I knew about this person and her family, how much intimate knowledge I didn’t want to remember but did.
In the past few days, there’s been a lot of chatter on various social media platforms about the children of influencer families, and how many family households are supported by the content produced by the children within them. There are no laws to protect the income nor the exploitation of children who make content online or have content made about them, and every time this conversation comes around (I think it’s a 5 year cycle) I have the same core cringe memory. Around 2002 or 2003, Heather posted pictures of one of her children after Heather had taken a shower and afterward found said child in the Pack n’Play with…well, let’s say a solid waste deposit had occurred and then been used for much artwork and exploration.
I remember so clearly thinking, ‘Some day your child is going to be in MIDDLE SCHOOL. Remember middle school? It sucks. And now you’ve given every mean kid astonishing options to make your child’s life absolute hell.’
Dooce’s mining of her children’s lives for content influenced my own decision to refer to my children by code names here, and to make them decidedly not part of my writing online. My kids should have the same opportunity I did: to roll onto the internet without an identity pre-formed for them by a parent, and to decide who and how they wanted to be online. I worried for her children then, and as her writing grew more and more harmful, I worried for them more. My heart hurts for them today.
But even with all of that, all of the complicated history of living her life and her motherhood and identity online, I cannot deny how much her writing influenced me, nor how much my life would be different if I’d never read Dooce.com, and so many other blogs of the era.
I can just…write? Say what I want to say about any number of things? I don’t have to wait for permission?
That was revolutionary.
Dooce.com was revolutionary. She wrote about the painful, awkward, messy, and horrifying realities of motherhood and parenting and existing in the world, and inspired so many other writers to be honest and messy and talk with extreme candor about their own experiences. That writing became known, rather pejoratively, as ‘mommy blogging.’ Does it resonate with me on a core level when something that women experience and create is denigrated? Goodness me, why, yes, it does.
I remember reading her experience with brutal postpartum depression alone in my cubicle at my part-time job when I was in grad school and wasn’t sure I’d chosen the right path for myself. I didn’t know what else to do, but I knew I wasn’t happy. Writing and blogging became something I did alongside my employment, and reading blogs was something I did on the sly at my job.
Heather was fired from her job because of her site, and she coined the term “dooced” – which is of course in urban dictionary. Did I learn from Dooce’s experience and by her example to adopt what I call ‘The Mafia Rule of Blogging?’ Yes, I did: “Never write about the work, and never write about the family.” (It’s most effective as a credo if you stroke your neck and half whisper in a poor imitation of Marlon Brando.)
She wrote about intimate moments of her life and her children’s lives, and was one of the very first bloggers to monetize so that content was very valuable. SBTB is also monetized in part because of Dooce. I run the main ad server here at SBTB because I reached out to the media company that managed Dooce’s advertisement bookings, probably in 2006 or 2007, sharing our stats and asking if they’d take the site on. I was told, basically, that our audience size and traffic were terrific, but that book blogs don’t sell. “The hell they don’t,” I thought, and found an open source ad server and taught myself to use it. Because of or in opposition to Dooce, I made a lot of decisions that changed my life.
She wrote about her life in a way that seemed shocking and deviant to me at the time, throwing mud on the shiny gleaming idea that motherhood was a sanctified state of perfection. She was crass and hilarious as she dismantled expectations and declared that so much of what we were taught to aspire to was largely horse manure, and she was funny while she did it. 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. 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. Dooce was “just a blog,” and it was massive.
I wished as she wrote increasingly awful things that she’d stop, and I wished that her struggles with her health and addiction would ease, but not like this. I’m shocked at her death, and I’m stunned to look back at the end of her life and see how much of an influence she had on me, on the ‘blogosphere’ (remember that term?) and on how so many people found their way into writing careers. It’s almost impossible to fully articulate how one site could create so much that affected other people, in both profoundly beneficial and harmful ways.
People are complicated and messy, no matter how easy it looks to flatten one’s branding and image into one simple narrative. That’s absolutely true of Heather, too. As a person on Reddit commented, she did everything in extremes.
I wouldn’t be writing any of this without Dooce.com, and even if her worldview went in a completely different direction than my own, her passing has made me pause and look at the thousands if not millions of ways online life can be traced back to this one person’s decision to start a blog. Most of all, I wish peace and comfort for her family, especially her children.
This is all so powerful and true. ❤️ it and you.
Oof. Yes. This all resonates, and I am also very sorry to hear this news even though I profoundly disagreed with her on multiple points.
It’s always hard to know what to say about someone you feel grateful to, but can not like. I think you’ve given her respectful and well thought out send off.
I’d be lying if I said I was shocked to hear the news, because I’m not. My heart truly breaks for her children, who have already been through so much in the public eye, through no choice of their own.
That’s really the crux of it, isn’t it? I’m thankful for everything I have learned, but, no, could not and cannot like.
In a way, this reminds me of what my daughters (now in their twenties) are going through regarding J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter was such a seminal part of their childhoods—and now they are grappling with the views that Rowling has espoused (which are completely at odds with the way they were raised and their own personal beliefs) and how now so much of the Potterverse can be viewed through that prism. It’s painful to acknowledge that people we have admired and loved have gone in a different political/social/cultural direction to the point that we can no longer recognize the person they once were. It speaks volumes about your character, Sarah, that you are able to separate the person Armstrong was from the person she became, and you are still able to acknowledge the influence she had on you while still recognizing how your paths eventually diverged. Well done.
Oof, I hadn’t heard this news yet. I haven’t kept up with her for years, and wasn’t even aware that she’d become so problematic. But like you, she was a formative part of my initial internet years. I thought about her when I had my daughters, and the idea of writing them letters on their birthdays was something I took from her.
I’m so sorry for her family, and I wish them peace.
Somewhat o/t, but I was today year’s old when I learned that Sarah had not actually named one of her children “Freebird”!
This is a wonderful, honest tribute that encapsulates so much of what I felt when I read the news of her death. Like so many others, I was an avid reader of Dooce, and was so grateful to have her voice in my life when I needed it — her youngest and my oldest are the same age, so I really (parasocially) bonded with her during that time. I eventually drifted away from her site for various reasons, some of which are the same as those discussed here. But she was so formative and necessary for me during a very vulnerable and challenging period in my life. I’m sorry to say that, like some others have noted, I was both shocked and not shocked at this news. It has really shaken me, though, and I feel deeply sad for her and her family that this is how her story ended.
Thanks for sharing that. I’ve had tangled up feelings of shock and sadness since I read of her passing.
I found her blog when I was on bed rest during pregnancy in 2011, left a comment on a post about how I was struggling with how the stunning sickness I experienced both hijacked my life and my distress at feeling like I was losing myself was so judged by those closest to me. I read a lot of her back posts the same day because bedrest and she was funny in a raw, no prisoners way that appealed to my then-bleak mood. She emailed me a brief message that day though I was one of a large number of comments on as you said a wildly popular blog. Her response was short, blunt, and sharply encouraging. No one, she indicated, had any right to tell me how to navigate a complicated and messy experience like my medically difficult pregnancy.
It wasn’t a life changing email, but I’ve read her blog intermittently since then, more in the first difficult year. Once she went all in on a paleo diet I kind of checked out, but read some again after her divorce. The first disjointed terf-y post felt like a slap in the face and I wondered who or what had radicalized her so suddenly, but couldn’t bring myself to engage any further to find out. It sickened me because of the journey of her younger child which I had followed early on.
I am very sad for her children, her mother. I hate that the things that plagued her took her.
Sarah, this essay is one of the best things you’ve ever written.
Pain can do terrible things to people. I think sometimes, when a person has been suffering from depression badly enough and long enough, they find something external to project some of the rage and self-loathing onto as a form of self-preservation. This post was the first time that I’d heard of Armstrong, so I have no idea if this would be applicable to her or not, but considering how she died, and that the screeds appeared late and were disjointed, it sounds possible.
(Obviously this wouldn’t absolve her, because plenty of people suffer from severe depression without becoming radical bigots.)
@Star: Thank you. That means so much to me, and I really appreciate it.
@Lora: It is terrifying to see people become radicalized so quickly, isn’t it? It’s not the first time I’ve seen it, but it left such a terrible feeling when I saw how virulent her writing was, and knowing it was about one of her own children was beyond heartbreaking to me.
Sarah, I’m so stunned by the news this morning. You remember the old days. I do too. I knew Heather before it all blew up. Now those memories are just cutting me to the quick.
It’s so hard to watch our idols become real. The disappointment becomes to repetitive as we age too which just gives us more time to compare and judge. So I think it’s fantastic that you can mourn the loss for what it is. Sticky. Life is sticky. Messy and gooey and sticky. Never exactly what we set out for but made with the best of intentions. Her intent was there, she tried. She was a trailblazer and for that, she deserves nothing but kudos.
She was in your life for a season, and then your paths diverged. It’s okay to honor that season and how it changed your own path. One can mourn the loss of the person we knew in a season, even if the diverged person wasn’t one with whom one would associate. The loss is still valid.
[…] Wendell of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books wrote about the death of Heather Armstrong a.k.a. Dooce. I never really read Dooce, but as someone who blogged then (as the archives of this website can […]
Such a wonderful way to descibe the complicated person behind the blog.