Editor’s note • This article discusses suicide. If you or people you know are at risk of self-harm, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline for 24-hour support.
Heather Brooke Hamilton, the Utah writer and “mommy blogger” who shared candid observations of parenting and her struggles with depression with millions of readers online and in memoirs, has died.
Hamilton — known to most as Heather Armstrong, or simply “Dooce” — died Tuesday, according to a post shared on her Instagram account. She was 47.
The post did not state how Hamilton died, but The Associated Press confirmed with Hamilton’s partner, Pete Ashdown, that she died by suicide.
He found her Tuesday at their Salt Lake City home, Ashdown told The Associated Press, sharing that Hamilton, who had been sober for more than 18 months, had recently relapsed.
‘Queen of the Mommy Bloggers’
(Scott Sommerdorf | The Salt Lake Tribune) Heather Hamilton, also known as Heather Armstrong, or "Dooce," sits with Pete Ashdown prior to her speaking at the 8th annual mass resignation from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in City Creek Park, Sunday, November 5, 2017.
At its height, Hamilton’s blog Dooce.com attracted about 8.5 million monthly readers, eager to follow her efforts to raise her two daughters. She joked in 2006 that she made a living writing “quaint little stories about poop.” In 2011, The New York Times Magazine dubbed her the “Queen of the Mommy Bloggers.”
Hamilton began writing her blog in Los Angeles in February 2001, posting regularly about “anything and everything,” including her work as a web designer and graphic artist. Her posts about work — in which she called her boss “Her Wretchedness” — got Hamilton fired in February 2002. It was believed to be the first time someone got fired for something they wrote in a blog, and “dooced” became a verb for such a firing.
Hamilton played it cool online after being fired, but she was mortified. “I felt myself on the edge of a mental and emotional breakdown,” she told The Salt Lake Tribune in 2006, and she stopped writing for awhile.
Shortly after the firing, Hamilton married her then-boyfriend — referred to on her blog as “the Roommate” — Jon Armstrong, whom she had met while attending Brigham Young University. When he was laid off two months after their wedding, they moved back to Utah. Their first daughter, Leta, was born 14 months later. Marlo was born in 2009. Hamilton and Armstrong divorced in 2012.
After her first daughter was born, Hamilton was admitted to a psychiatric ward in 2004 because of depression and suicidal thoughts. She told The Tribune that her daughter stopped her from enacting her suicidal ideations.
While hospitalized, she sent Armstrong observations that he then posted to her blog — and her readership took off.
Another regular topic on Dooce.com was Heather’s views on The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in which she was raised as member while growing up in Memphis. She left the church the day she graduated from BYU.
Her parents were “heartbroken” about what Hamilton wrote about them and the faith — though, as her mother, Linda, said in 2006, she realized that their daughter had fulfilled her dream of becoming a writer.
Battling depression
( The Salt Lake Tribune ) The cover of "The Valedictorian of Being Dead: The True Story of Dying Ten Times to Live," by Utahn Heather Armstrong, known more recently as Heather Hamilton. The book, about Hamilton's experimental treatment with anesthesia for depression, was released April 23, 2019. Hamilton died on Tuesday, May 9, 2023.
More recently, Hamilton’s writings have detailed her battles with depression and sobriety. In her 2019 memoir, “The Valedictorian of Being Dead: The True Story of Dying Ten Times to Live,” she described University of Utah doctors giving her high doses of anesthesia that brought her close to death but also “reboot[ed]” her brain.
In an interview that year with The Tribune, she said the treatments worked — and she hoped her journey would give hope and relief to others struggling with mental illness, showing them that their struggle was not a personal failing but a health issue.
Prior to treatment, Hamilton thought her depression stemmed from her intense diet and training to help guide a runner with visual impairment in the Boston Marathon. But after the race, she still felt hopeless, waking up each morning and “gasp[ing] for breath as my anxiety set fire to every molecule in my body,” she wrote in her book.
That’s how she began the anesthetic treatments with a team of researchers at the U.
“It was very validating in the sense that I had been so sick, and my brain had been so diseased it had convinced me that life was not worth living,” Hamilton told The Tribune in 2019. “Suddenly a day after the treatment I was like, ‘How? How could I have possibly gotten there?’”
Following news of Hamilton’s Tuesday death, Kim Myers, manager of Intermountain Health’s behavioral health clinical program, told The Tribune that just because someone has struggled with suicidal ideation does not mean that dying by suicide is inevitable.
“I think it’s important to understand both mental illness and addiction as potentially chronic, relapsing and episodic illnesses,” Myers said, “and some people benefit from one round of treatment, and some people need support off and on, or continuously, through their whole lives.”
She added that research shows that nine out of 10 people who survive a suicide attempt don’t end up dying by suicide. That’s hopeful, Myers said, because it shows that support and treatment help.
“That reinforces that it’s never fated,” she said. “There’s always an opportunity to intervene.”
Interventions can come from friends, co-workers, neighbors, family members or anyone else who may notice someone’s behavior is abnormal. Maybe they aren’t interested in playing soccer anymore. Or they have started drinking again. Or perhaps someone simply notices a mood change.
“Just start a nonjudgemental conversation about what’s going on,” Myers said. Then let that person know you care, offer support and connect them with crisis resources. Those who are struggling themselves and don’t have anyone they feel they can talk to can also access crisis resources, Myers said.
She noted that death can trigger strong emotions in people, even when they didn’t personally know the person who died.
“There was so much of [Hamilton’s] personal life shared that it feels closer for some, even if you didn’t know her,” Myers said, “and that’s totally reasonable.”
Those affected by the loss of others should not hesitate to access mental health resources, too, Myers said. In addition to the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, those seeking helping for grief, depression, suicidal ideation, substance misuse or other mental health issues can call Intermountain’s Behavioral Health Access Center at 833-442-2211.
‘Hold your loved ones close’
Meg Conley, a Latter-day Saint essayist and publisher of an online newsletter called “homeculture,” said in an audio clip posted on her blog Wednesday about Hamilton’s death that Hamilton’s work changed — even saved — her life.
Conley said in the clip that Hamilton’s decision to have another child after struggling with postpartum depression, “it kept me here, in so many ways.”
”In the months after I had my first child, I thought a lot about not existing anymore,” Conley said, “but Heather Armstrong had thought about that too. And she’d gotten through it. And having a child and being a mother was so light-filled for her that she decided to be potentially in that darkness again, just so she could have another child.”
While Conley said she eventually stopped reading Hamilton’s blog after beginning to see parts of it as problematic, she acknowledged that Hamilton helped create the industry that Conley emulates in some ways with “homeculture.”
“I learned from her mistakes,” Conley said. “There wasn’t a Dooce before Dooce, and so I don’t know whose mistakes she would have been able to learn from.”
“I guess her own,” she continued, “but isn’t that so, so painful?”
Hamilton’s most recent Dooce.com entry, dated April 6, 2023, discussed her 18 months of sobriety and coming to terms with the “22 years of agony I had numbed with alcohol.” It doted on 18-year-old Leta’s independence and comedic aptitude, and reflected on the “blessing and curse” of the clarity sobriety provided her in the last year before her daughter left home for college.
“Here at 18 months sober, I salute my 18-year-old frog baby, she who taught me how to love,” Hamilton wrote.
Like many of her posts, this one included links to songs that meant something to Hamilton — the Stars’ song she listened to on the way to the hospital to give birth; The Cure song that inspired Leta’s middle name; a Coldplay song that reminded her of her daughter’s green eyes.
The short Instagram post announcing Hamilton’s death also included music — a lyric from alternative band The National’s “Terrible Love,” a song about feeling overwhelmed with the intoxicating, and horrifying, aspects of love.
It quoted from the song, “‘It takes an ocean not to break,’” then added, “Hold your loved ones close and love everyone else.”
