Heather B. Armstrong

"Dooced" In 2002, Armstrong ignited a fierce debate about privacy issues when she was allegedly fired from her job as a web designer and graphic artist because she had written satirical accounts of her experiences at a dot-com startup on her personal blog, dooce.com.

"Dooced" can mean "getting fired for something you've written on your website", a sense humorously disavowed by Armstrong in her blog's FAQ. This definition was used by the television game show Jeopardy! on December 10, 2009, as evidenced by a screenshot on her blog the following day.

Books In late 2005, Armstrong entered into negotiations with Kensington Books to publish two books, one of which was to be a memoir of early parenthood. The negotiations broke down in May 2006, and Kensington sued to force Armstrong to fulfill the terms of the unsigned contract. In October 2006 both parties agreed to a settlement that allowed Armstrong to seek another publisher.

Kensington Books published a book of essays, Things I Learned About My Dad: In Therapy, on April 29, 2008, edited by Heather B. Armstrong.

Her second book, It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita, was published on March 24, 2009, by Simon Spotlight Entertainment. It reached #16 on The New York Times Bestseller List for April 12, 2009.

The Valedictorian of Being Dead was published in 2019.

Other ventures Armstrong was a music columnist and consultant for Alpha Mom. She and her ex-husband ran Armstrong Media, LLC, a web design, advertising and content-generation business. , Jon Armstrong was running it without her. She also was a panelist for the online video series Momversation.

In late 2009, Armstrong announced a partnership with the television network HGTV in which she would "work with HGTV's online and on-air production teams to create innovative convergence programming for the network." While the bulk of her partnership activities began in early 2010, Armstrong began contributing weekly content to the network's Design Happens blog in February 2010. Her last post on Design Happens was in September 2010.

Personal life

Marriage, divorce, hiatus, and depression Through a mutual friend Heather met Jon Armstrong, another former Mormon web developer from Utah. They married and returned to their home state to start a family. In 2004, after the couple's first daughter was born, Armstrong began devoting much of her blog to parenting, becoming one of the first, as well as most popular, mommybloggers.

In 2012, the Armstrongs announced they were separating; they divorced later that year. Heather posted to Dooce explaining why, while Jon posted on his blog, Blurbomat. At the time the announcement came as a surprise since Heather had never written about any marital difficulties, and had often written positively of her husband's support for her during her struggles with the children and her depression. Later, she said the couple had at that point been in counseling for years; Jon was "controlling and punishing" and expected her to just get over the negative commentary on her site. While she was able at first to travel and make speaking engagements, and do some freelance marketing work, she soon found the pressures of single parenthood overwhelmed her. Depression returned and in 2017, Armstrong said she felt like "a heap of nothingness" and could not go on living. in their shared Salt Lake City home. Ashdown stated that Armstrong had been sober from alcohol for 18 months before recently relapsing.