She never intended to be a mommy blogger. Credit: Paul Chinn/Getty

Heather Armstrong didn’t mean to become a “mommy blogger”. In 1997, she taught herself to code, and began working at a Los Angeles tech start-up. When she started writing about her life online, her focus was Dilbert-style office politics. The title of the blog, “Dooce”, which eventually became better-known than her own name, came from a misspelling of “dude” in a group chat. Eventually, her unwise online disclosures got her fired — “Dooced”, as the process of sacking incautious bloggers came to be called.
Armstrong started mining the rest of her life. Dooce pivoted to offering carefully-scripted “unvarnished realities” on parenthood, marriage, and Armstrong’s struggles with depression. The market in the early 2000s was far less crowded than it was even a decade later, allowing a cornball line like this to land in a way it probably wouldn’t today: “I am here to tell you that there is no possible way to have an 8-pound creature GUMMING your tender nipple without the slightest bit of discomfort……the only way to describe it to a man is to suggest that he lay out his naked penis on a chopping block, place a manual stapler on the sacred helmet head, and bang in a couple hundred staples.” Off the back of insights such as these, Armstrong gained a monthly readership of 8.5 million fans, raking in anywhere from $30,000 to $50,000 a month at her peak. In 2011, Forbes ranked her 26th on its list of most the influential women in all media. Federated Media, the entity responsible for managing advertisements on her blog, celebrated Armstrong as one of their most prosperous bloggers, a top performer who generated over $1 million a year in ad revenue.
The same year, Armstrong contributed a foreword to Mom Blogging for Dummies, writing: “Some women who do what I do reject this label altogether because they consider the term mommy to be belittling. I understand this complaint, but I’m quite proud to be a member of this movement, this revolution of women determining their own destinies.” Hers is a cautionary tale, however, for those of us who write and consume content for a living.
Armstrong’s fame and online presence had greatly receded by the time she committed suicide at home earlier this year. In The Valedictorian of Being Dead, published in 2019, she details a life spent battling depression — on ten occasions, she went into a medically-induced coma, simulating brain death, in an attempt to alleviate her symptoms. Somewhere between introducing a guide to making money from nonstop mommy blogging and declaring mommy blogging dead, Armstrong came to recognise — or decided to admit — the negative impact her work was having on her mental health. In the foreword, she writes with a sense of pride, “I don’t get to go on vacation.” In The Valedictorian of Being Dead, she expressed her longing for an escape “the hamster wheel of my day-to-day existence”:
“I knew I just couldn’t do it anymore when I was trying to get my kids into the car to play a word game while driving to a ranch in the mountains. This would be the third of three posts I was to write for an automotive brand about quality time with my kids in the car … Marlo did not want to participate in yet another ruse, and I had to bribe and threaten and cajole to get her in that car. Right as she opened her door, she looked up at me through tears and begged, ‘Please, Mom, don’t make me do this.’”
Armstrong’s transition from viewing her work as a fulfilling occupation to a trap reflects the paradoxical reality of life as a content creator: the same facts, framed differently as market conditions changed, transformed from a testament of her dedication to a cry for relief. But it also speaks to a universal experience of life lived in the digital age. Her journey — from a person who wrote about her life on the internet for fun to an entrepreneur supporting not only her family but also employees with her blog revenues — illustrates the tremendous opportunity of the dotcom boom. But it also reveals the precarity inherent in what was then a burgeoning marketplace of intimate stories that would, as one critic observed later, gradually evolve into a “personal-essay industrial complex”.
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