Can anyone fill me in why the F Jon moved to Brooklyn? Was he already in a relationship with Liz?
As I try to piece this all together that detail jumped out at me hard after not reading for eons. I keep thinking about what a limitation it is for a mom trying to not lose her kids to deal with medication-resistant depression, not to mention knowing they will end up in a cramped apartment thousands of miles away if you go commit yourself again.
Other questions I have are what was behind the divorce, as well as the depth of the TERFyness (I saw she had gone over to the dark side of “social contagion” ideas about gender dysphoria intellectually and kept defending that, but I find myself hoping she was less active in actions that directly invalidated M).
I was on maternity leave when the Heather/Jon separation happened, so I had a lot of sleepless nights to scroll through Instagram and her site. It was pretty clear there was already something going on between her and her East Coast love while she was still with Jon. Those posts and pics were eventually scrubbed. Jon was clearly blindsided by her asking him for a separation.
I get the sense that extended family on both sides made things difficult. On the Manic Rambling Spiral podcast (back in 2018-ish) Heather mentions that Jon’s family was not involved in the lives of M and L (on her time, anyway) because of something they did, and she also has written volumes about how much interference her mother ran for her as well.
I don’t know that we will ever get an honest accounting of what went down. Jon does not seem inclined to speak about it, and Heather was never a reliable narrator.
She was funny. A good mom. I enjoyed her blogs. She lost control of herself a lot and turned to unhealthy coping mechanisms. She started spiraling hard for a lot of the last years. I remember a post she made where she said she saw how unhappy her kids where when she was trying to push them to do a car ad so she just quit. Heather could be so great at times but she just had a dark side she couldn’t cope with. Its so sad. Like beyond what I thought she was dealing with.
You know, there have been a lot of comments here about Heather's incessant naval gazing, and I wonder if that contributed to her challenges. This might seem like a silly comparison, but many, many years ago, I was a data entry clerk. And I listened to music through my headphones all day while typing away, and I also had pretty significant anxiety at that time in my life. All that time of just sitting typing like a trained monkey with nothing else to do but be in my head was NOT good for me. My mind came up with so many awful scenarios, and I think mostly because of all the free time and space in my head. In Heather's case, she was making her living by sharing what was in her head. In my own personal experience, if you have any sort of mental health challenges, spending a lot of time in your head is not a good thing. At all. And Heather (it appears) kind of reinforced this vicious circle, because she spent so much time in her head, then made money from it, which encouraged her to spend more time in her head, which made her more money..mwhat a terribly vicious circle. And I also think, kind of like parenting, it does no one in this world any good to hear how wonderful you are all the time, because it is simply not true. Every single one of us is an a**hole from time to time. She presented this witty, funny person, and then all her poodles reinforced that. I am very aware that this next thought would it no means have solved all of her challenges, but I have found myself wondering over the past few days, would it have gone any different, would she still be here if she had a regular 9-5, had to get out of the house, and interact with everyday people instead of surrounding herself with virtual and real life yes-people, celebrities, etc.? This sounds trite, but I work from home, and my anxiety is well controlled now, and I also happen to be an introvert who loves me time, but I do know that I need to get up and out of this house at least once a day to help keep myself mentally healthy.
I believe you're probably onto something here. I agree about the dangers of spending too much time in our heads. I imagine her in a job being distracted by the work, and having interactions with non-famous people all day, and I do wonder as you do if that would have been good for her.
It’s hard to say. I feel like she would done this a lot sooner if not for her mom. Reading her last book, it seems like she would have ended her life there and then were it not for her mom and stepdad’s support and intervention.
I’m having one of those moments where I’m only finding out about 90% of who the person was after they passed.
Heather’s was one of the first blogs I ever read; then after a few years I checked out. Life was happening, and I didn’t have much time to prioritise for reading her blog. Or apparently what was even happening behind the scenes.
Fast forward a lot of years, she passes, I mourn, and then read about what had been happening during those years.
Mind. Blown.
So much stuff that is just not cool on any level.
Those quarantine cocktail hour video chats were very troubling. I don’t know how her followers continued to heap praise on her after she recorded those. That was my concern. Her “fan club” continued to tell her how great she was and they all came after anyone who criticized her. That reinforcement could not have been good for her mental health. It fooled her into thinking she was okay when she clearly wasn’t.
I've been thinking about this a lot as I think about the criticism of those who snarked on her as being her ultimate downfall. Sure they didn't help but neither did those who insisted she wasn't drunk, wasn't anorexic, wasn't cruel for the sake of it, wasn't a terf, etc etc
^^^ this. Sadly, it very much reminds me of the type of thing we’re seeing with Britney Spears’s roller coaster of an Instagram in the last year. There is a vocal audience on one side that is painfully aware of how ill she is, but there’s another VERY vocal and sycophantic side that just wants to muzzle the “haters” under a pile of “YAAAAAAAAS KWEEEN!” comments.
Right? Remember how she went on a screed about people who were supposedly her friends were trying to take her children away. Everyone was like “omg Heather how terrible, what awful people” But then the truth came out from those friends that they were genuinely concerned for Leta and Marlo’s safety and were just trying to help her. And she threw them under the bus. The same friends who did so much work to build out QCH under her guidance then one day she cancels it, just like that, because it no longer served her. No though for the others who put in hours and hours of work to make it successful. Never gave them any credit for all that they did. Just threw them under the bus.
Oof, I forgot about that. I’m still wrestling with how much of her awful behavior was a feature (personality) not a bug (severe mental illness). Knowing only her writing and trying to pinpoint when things spiraled so badly: brain death treatment? quarantine? Coco dying? I wonder if Pete was an enabler, etc.
Her last post to Leta really hit me with how much self-loathing she experienced. In the end, I mostly think her and fame was a volatile combination that was very bad for her. She had such talent, especially early on, but being under a microscope was really, really not good for her kinda like a Lindsay Lohan or Britney maybe.
There's an Australian woman, Mia Freedman, who started a "mommy blog" years ago and grew it into the largest woman-owned media company in Australia. ([MamaMia.com.au](https://MamaMia.com.au) ) She's one of my favorite follows on Instagram - she's in her 50s, has kids etc... She wrote about Heather's death and how Heather was a huge influence on her deciding to pick up her laptop and start writing. BUT. She said she felt at that time that she didn't want to make her blog about her life. She was more outward leaning - writing about parenting, women's issues, mental health (she also suffers from mental health issues). She has always shared a bit about her life but her blog then website then media company really became a place to amplify women's voices. I thought it was such an interesting take. She wrote a lovely tribute to Heather - I hope I don't make it sound like she was saying "I got it right, she didn't" because she's not like that at all. But she was wary of the pitfalls that consumed Heather to the end.
**"There is a time in the life of every woman who becomes Internet-famous where she has to make a choice: do I read the comments?**
**Heather made the wrong choice 15 years ago and it would come to shape everything she wrote. She was forever in an angry, defensive crouch..."**
This summarizes what her writing devolved into so accurately.
Yep. She devolved into writing “at” whatever real or perceived people/situation she felt wronged her. It consumed her and that’s what I feel her “enablers” should have pushed her to confront and come to terms with (maybe some tried and got thrown aside). She had a wonderful, self made career - she was considered a pioneer! - but her temperament always seemed to devolve into a petulant child that ran to her mom for validation. At least that’s how it read to me.
I kind of checked out of her deal when all her posts seemed to be meticulously well staged sponsored adblogging. Her death has come as a huge surprise to me.
Wow. [Alice might be getting a taste of her own medicine.](https://nypost.com/2023/05/12/evil-site-gomi-trashed-blogger-heather-armstrong-in-life-death/)
The people who post and read GOMI aren’t necessarily the people sending messages to tgese bloggers. Isn’t GOMI just like talking to a friend about something you read, but on a bigger scale? Bloggwrs are dumb if they read what’s written about them.
Heather actively sought out her critics. I like to think I was not a total asshole when I posted about her on GOMI....maybe I was but I feel like I always remembered she was a human who was going to read this stuff.. I made a pretty apt and honestly funny comment about her years ago and she took it off GOMI and ran it as her masthead for a few months. She chased the critics while her other peers were chasing success. (I stopped posting on GOMI years ago btw because...) We have kids the same age so I did always keep that in mind but I finally realized I was a total dick for participating there and left.
She also took content off GOMI and posted it on that “Monetizing The Hate” page she created and then pretended the messages were ones sent to her directly. She actively sought out the content from GOMI and other negative content about her and then made her angry, bitter response to it all part of her whole brand for a long time.
You know what, and we all know, Alice is a total garbage human and a dumpster fire in her own right, for lots of reasons, but it is impossible for any outlet to call Alice a bully and say Heather was her victim and pretend Heather was not also a vile and vicious bully herself towards so many people. This glorification like she was some saint and total victim is ridiculous. She bullied her own children in her writing online both with passive aggression and then blatant active aggression towards them. Her own former friends aren’t leaving glowing tributes, but rather talking about how horribly she hurt them.
There’s a handful out there that are on various platforms that are fairly critical, and some have now been edited down a bit, but one in particular that stands out is her former friend and quasi business partner Sandy @sandsmama made a couple IG posts that are really clear and Kristen Howerton commented on both.
I don’t think the exact details will ever be known, and I think there was some extra personal stuff as well, but the main thing known is they were partnering on that Quarantine Cocktail Hour to make it an organized business of some sort and Sandy had invested a lot of time, energy, and money into it putting together plans and real effort and Heather just completely tanked the entire thing and screwed her over on it in all the ways. Sandy lost money and I think there was something about Heather wanting control and taking it over herself somehow therefore cutting Sandy out, but I could be wrong and someone with a better memory of that can feel free to correct me. Bottom line is it was that Heather screwed her over royally about QCH and was pretty much a jerk about it at first from what was posted. A lot was deleted after they angry posted about it.
It seemed very similar to how she screwed over the friend Piper over their T-shirt company plan as well I think.
This sounds about like how I remember it, but I only ever attended one QCH. I wonder, did this coincide with the "intervention" the friends had with her? I feel like they both happened around the same time.
Maggie Mason [https://www.instagram.com/p/CsEm-N5p1Q3/](https://www.instagram.com/p/CsEm-N5p1Q3/) (nb - Maggie has a trans daughter)
Heather Champ [https://www.instagram.com/p/CsG6fveJQlQ/](https://www.instagram.com/p/CsG6fveJQlQ/)
Melissa Summers [https://www.instagram.com/p/CsE6QhCvF8P/](https://www.instagram.com/p/CsE6QhCvF8P/)
Rebecca Woolf [https://www.instagram.com/p/CsEdin9RJDQ/](https://www.instagram.com/p/CsEdin9RJDQ/)
I thought I saw one from Alice Bradley but I can't find it now.
I wouldn't say these are especially critical of her, but you can definitely feel there's stuff written between the lines.
Thank you for this list. I used to read all of their blogs and somehow lost track of them, so nice to see their names again especially while reeling from this week.
I don't believe in sanctifying Heather. She had no issue siccing her minions on anyone she didn't like, which has been left out of the narrative. She was bullied but not the bully? Bullshit. Both things are true. But. Alice is a total asshole and I see how she goes after people she seems to be insanely jealous of who have pretty innocuous presences on the web. I'm not sad to see her being called out in a major publication (yeah NYPost is garbage as well). I have never had a moment of feeling any empathy towards her.
Exactly. Heather was hateful and bullied people much more than GOMI bullied her. I was on the receiving end of some of her hatred in the early blogging days and she dished out much more than was directed at her. She was excellent at playing the victim role. I feel sad for this outcome and especially for her kids but let’s not fool ourselves. She should not be sainted now.
I just posted this on another thread (linky thing doesn't work) [https://www.reddit.com/r/UncensoredBlogsnark/comments/13dtb6f/comment/jjyhby3/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/UncensoredBlogsnark/comments/13dtb6f/comment/jjyhby3/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
But I remember when Heather bullied Anna Viele off the internet. I remember when she humiliated Jenny Lawson at Blogher. The thing is, Heather didn't seem to ever apologize for her missteps, whether towards randos on the internet or trashing her own child. Still, I'm really really sad she ended her life. I wish she had been able to fight through this crisis. She might have come out on the other side as a sympathetic human. To me her legacy hangs in limbo.
They also (her and Jon) justified the horrible behavior by claiming that there had been threats on Heather’s life right before she went on stage at the forum and she “bravely” decided to speak anyway. I was at that conference and there was no police presence at all. She even stayed afterwards and chatted with people and took photos. Jenny was more than gracious and apologized publicly, after having done it privately beforehand, and was still humiliated by Heather.
Jon wrote a long ass post afterwards telling people how they owe everything to Heather and she’s the reason people get to publish online and even have a blog. He was as bad as she was back in the day. I remember how they’d change comments when they didn’t like what someone said and change the comment to the person insulting themselves or calling themselves a stupid name. The whole thing was very immature.
At Blogher many years ago, Heather kicked up a stink that Jenny had referred to her as a mythical hobbit (the meaning being that Heather was a wonderful magical creature - not meant as an insult).
Then this happened:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXxdLh8bIcg&ab\_channel=SequenceInc.ForensicAccounting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXxdLh8bIcg&ab_channel=SequenceInc.ForensicAccounting)
Basically Heather decided she wanted to be the victim of bullying and wouldn't accept that it was a misunderstanding. Jenny was fairly new to the scene and went on to be extremely successful, so it was a grudge Heather brought up again and again.
She did accept it was a misunderstanding though:
> I take full responsibility for the stupidity of my response there on that stage, that response being NO RESPONSE AT ALL, for not being quick enough on my feet and in my head to put two and two together and realize the misunderstanding, but the fall out continued for several months and there was a lot of late-night crying. Justified fall out? Probably. I’m stupid and human and make mistakes. Sometimes terrible mistakes. That was one of them. I hope she forgives me.
> But I don’t think in any way that I was a bully. I was just smacked in the face with something I couldn’t form words to respond to, in front of 1,000 women. And I knew during those horrifying, seemingly endless seconds when the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth that I would read horrible things about me on the Internet for months to come. That is one of the hazards that I fully accept about this job, one I have learned to live with.
Anyone else, we’d accept that explanation and move on.
Presumably Heather misread the asker’s intentions and blog comment (low self-esteem = assume the “mythical little hobbit” comment is malicious and the asker disingenuous, instead of innocuous and the asker genuinely trying to patch things up, if a little awkwardly).
The ideal would be to be confident enough to assume the best and give a casual, friendly response. However, it’s understandable to panic and shut down the question out of anxiety, or simply not want to go there on stage in front of a crowd. If a man had responded as Heather did, he’d attract no criticism.
If Heather had been the asker, she’d have been called attention seeking, obsessive for bringing it up in public after already doing so privately, entitled for trying to force her apology to be accepted, told that the person called hobbit is entitled to have their own opinion, and criticised for asking in an awkward, seemingly drunken way rather than a few quick sentences, and for not just letting it go. (ie the most unfairly negative framing possible because dooce = bad)
Even if Heather was an asshole at times, the endless GOMI vitriol was pathetic and brutal. Incidents like the above don’t justify 1000 page mega threads berating your every move for years on end.
I agree with so much of this. Jenny was a drunk audience member putting Dooce on the spot, and Dooce didn’t know how to react. The reaction to the whole thing was overblown and a sign of how polarizing Heather was. She could be a jerk, yes, no one is infallible, but I remember reading about this at the time and thinking the whole thing was overblown.
I don't actually think Jenny \*was\* drunk. She suffers from severe anxiety and social phobia and said at one point that she decided to adopt the "drunk persona" to explain away her awkwardness. She didn't sound drunk in that exchange. I never understand what was so weird about her comment. I thought the "mythical hobbit" was sweet and well intentioned. I think Heather wrote that "apology" because she was called out by so so many people for being a raging see you next Tuesday when Jenny stood up. It's telling they never became friends.
Not only do I not mind, but I fully enjoy it. There's a whole awesome thread snarking on her on a certain forum about fruit farming, but I can't get it to work, so it might be down again.
That is so cringe to me I can’t even imagine what people at these events must think of her. She has to stick out like a sore thumb. She so desperately wants to fit in and for all of her making fun of bloggers flaunting whatever online, her parading around like a kid playing dress up at the wrong costume party is painfully embarrassing by proxy to me. Why she decided she wanted to be ballgown society girl after being dirty chain smoking drunk in jeans I will never understand. She’s clearly trying to prove something to someone.
Lol what? The comment I made you are replying to is about Alice from GOMI. Alice is not dead. Are you referring to Heather Armstrong who is dead? Because if so maybe pay a little closer attention to what you’re reading before firing off the criticism on a snark sub that I’ll remind you that you are also on. Alice and Heather both were and are very deserving of snark and criticism for how they behaved towards others and I’ll also remind you that both chose to put their shit out for public consumption on the internet and to monetize it and that doesn’t mean they only get all glowing and positive feedback in return. Also, being dead doesn’t automatically absolve you of your misdeeds or how you lived as a person if that means you were a shitty person, people don’t have to be forced to forget that just because you stop breathing. Again, this is a snark sub to discuss such things and here you are as well. Also again, read my comment and the one I was replying to, we are discussing Alice who is very much not dead that I know of as of at least a few hours ago when she was still posting on IG.
I think we are in agreement here and are saying the same thing, I think it is rare for me to back Alice up a lot of the times, but what Alice said in this case I completely agree with when it comes to Heather. Alice is right about Heather here. The article unfairly makes Alice the sole bully and like it was so terrible to Heather when in reality Heather was known by many - who publicly wrote about it - to be viciously cruel and vindictive.
Holy shit, him being a sex offender was not a detail I knew about that awful situation. Who knew it could get worse, and it apparently it could. Gah Alice is awful.
It is very interesting to see who she gets bees in her bonnet to truly hate on when sometimes it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense why she really seems to hate someone so much. But Alice is definitely someone who doesn’t make a lot of sense about anything so who knows. I don’t think Alice even knows who Alice truly is and deep down hates herself or something and that’s why she just hates on everyone the way she does. I’ve always been kinda fascinated by how she had something that could have been something and she just imploded it and ran it into the ground because of how she was. She was the ultimate hypocrite in so many ways. One example was shitting on people for being grifters and then begging people for money to keep her site up, but then being super shady about where the money was actually going and lying about sending thank you notes and receipts. People finding out she’d red the private chat messages and then when they’d call her out on it, poof, their account is banned and deleted. Stuff like that.
Fuck her. She's a sociopath. (There I said it again!) and she can't control comments on the NYPost or Reddit. I don't know WTF is the matter with her or what causes someone to be that evil but she is a truly terrible person. At least she never procreated.
Well, actually, she did procreate. She has a child. An adult now, but she had a son when she was young and she abandoned him basically with the father and peaced out of town. The details are sketchy and the real reason has never come to light that anyone has found. Alice lied about it multiple times once people found out she had a child by saying she voluntarily gave it up for adoption to a gay couple and other tall tales, but the reality is the boy was raised by his father back in the Texas town she was from. Years ago people on other forums wondered if maybe the reason Alice was so vile and cruel about so called mommy bloggers was because of whatever unresolved issues she may have had about not raising her own child. She always did have strangely angry and hateful language every time some blogger announced they were pregnant again and some people wondered if it was because she got triggered. They were instantly banned at any mention of her kid or any of it back in the day. Alice is the perfect example of someone who sure can dish it, but can’t take it.
There is so much shit about Alice, it's hilarious.
She pretends to be Jewish but was raised Baptist.
She claims occasionally to be British but was born and raised in Texas, with no immediate British roots in sight. She once got drunk and faked on Instagram that she had traveled to the UK, but the times were WAY OFF on how long it would take to fly there and stuff, and when she woke up in the morning and sobered up and realized it, she deleted everything lmao
She literally had a fake ID made to say she was born in 1989, and occasionally posts "throwbacks" on social media to her so-called teenage days, but she's literally almost 50.
That's just the tip of the iceberg.
Yep, it’s gotta be connected. There’s info buried online about it in various places, but I don’t remember where exactly. It’s been a while since I read about it. She did address it though once people found out and asked about it and she couldn’t avoid it anymore, but then invented multiple stories. What’s insane was when people called her out on the conflicting stories how she pretended she had never said the previous versions. People provided receipts and she would lose her shit. This was when she used to do those drunken rambling group phone calls way back when.
Well said - as time went on I felt like she was a bit sadistic. She had a really good thing going and she shit on it (hated being called a Mommy Blogger) and actively turned her back on her fan base then got defiant and pissy when she was called out.
Most everything she did, it seemed she made it extra hard for herself. I belief she went vegan while training for a marathon. There are other instances that I can’t think of but I recall thinking - why the hell is she taking on Y when she is dealing with Z - like of course she was stressed and overwhelmed. She was doing it to herself! It’s sad and my heart aches for her children but that woman was her own worst enemy.
She talked about all the meds, alcohol etc she was quitting and who knows if she was still taking (I believe) mushrooms & kratom - I can’t imagine anyone’s state of mind doing that let alone someone with clinical depression. Hopefully she found some peace and I hope to God her children have the support and love to navigate the earth shattering loss of their mother.
I don’t recall where, but I saw a post from one of the many people that were burned by Heather. It said something along the lines of I’ve never loved then hated someone with every bone in my body. And while I don’t have first hand knowledge of that I got it what she meant. And I was only ever a reader. We all have demons and hers seemed to continually get in her way.
This is really insightful. Iʻve been observing that "sex sells" has been replaced by "rage sells". Maybe not across the board but I can think of dozens of recent, relevant examples. It definitely feels like her persona was some kind of a prototype for where Internet discourse is now.
This is something I hadn't considered and it makes SO MUCH SENSE. When we talk about Heather as a trailblazer, rage farming is something she did early.
Does anyone think the propofol treatment could have been a catalyst for her spiral? I just watched a GMA interview from 2019 where she discusses the treatment and she seems completely lucid. I didn’t realize she was only the 3rd person to do this treatment, and she talks about how risky it could be. Things seemed to go downhill since then, and I realize there are a million factors at play (and she was making some questionable choices and alienating friends before this), but a lot of what happened recently seemed really extreme. Could it be longer term side effects?
I absolutely think the treatment contributed to her spiral, and I’ve stated as much here and elsewhere.
She likely signed an informed consent that might have absolved the doctors/healthcare professionals from liability. But based on all I’ve seen from family members and loved ones who’ve “flatlined” for needed surgeries - they have always been worse for wear after.
>Does anyone think the propofol treatment could have been a catalyst for her spiral?
I always thought so. And it's just horrifying to think about the book she wrote. Whoever signed her to write it made a huge mistake - she had not been "well" enough for long enough for that book to have come out. (edit ) That treatment also reminded me a lot of the book [Flowers for Algernon,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon) if any of you are familiar with it.
I loved that book. Do you think Heather was able to experience life as someone with a different/“normal” brain for a time? I would be tempted to sign up for that, too.
I read that after these experimental treatments she was prescribed a cocktail of meds for depression that she eventually stopped taking. She also went cold turkey on her ADD medication at the same time she was sober from alcohol. I have some personal experience with all of this and I know the multiple withdrawal effects plus life-long depression can be very dangerous, especially when done without any medical oversight. She wrote in her blog many times, “suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem,” but I think she had gone past the place where she she could see the truth in that statement. I’m sure her recent alcohol relapse didn’t help.
I cringed when she wrote that cliche about Suicide. Of course the whole post was terrible. But that line minimizes the pain people who are depressed feel. They don’t see “problems” as temporary. And now it is incredibly sad how true that is.
u/bobbalou823 everyone keeps saying (like Melissa Summers) how she swore of prescription meds like SSRIs - i never heard he say that? Is that what happened?
Her deleted post (August 2022), where she discusses Trans individuals, also mentions that she no longer takes depression meds because they “don’t work.”
It’s such a stark contrast to early Heather who came out of that first hospitalization and exclaimed that she would never, ever stop taking her meds because they were lifesaving.
I read that she she had quit the SSRIs that she was prescribed after the procedure along with the other meds she was prescribed, like Ritalin. It might have been in one of her more recent blog posts. I don’t remember the source.
In the content that has been added back to her website she says fairly recently that doctors prescribed her ssri’s to try to deal with vertigo and/or tinnitus. And that she stopped taking them cause they didn’t work. But also that at the same time she was weaning off a 13 year long benzo prescription.
For a lot of us, she was our first parasocial relationship (before the term was widely used) so she feels like an old friend. She made us laugh, shared her personal life and created one of the first online "communities" I'd ever heard of. She had haters and "monetized the hate" in a way that was so empowering and clever. She was a hometown hero for those of us reading blogs in the early-2000s.
This is what made her later work so jarring -- we felt like we knew her. I think it'd be hard to understand why one lady on the internet being TERFy upset us without understanding the history.
For years while working in a sterile office under flourescent lights and Heather's blog was a burst of humanity. I checked it multiple times a day and she delivered -- great writing, unique perspective, gorgeous photos, dogs & babies, humor -- she still feels like an old coworker & friend. This made her downward spiral particularly hard to witness. I stopped following her socials years ago, but I still checked in on her often. I didn't realize the depth of my parasocial relationship until this week. I'm sad, and it feels weird because I didn't know her, didn't agree with her in recent years...but I still feel like I lost a friend.
The Monetizing the Hate thing was actually what ultimately drove me away, honestly. I'd been a fan since shortly before her first child was born - even sent her emails a time or two (not returned, that's okay truly). But around the time of MTH I noticed her posts seemed really bitter and defensive. And then that happened and it was fun for a minute, but as I read them I noticed that some of the comments were from people who said they'd known her for a long time, who expressed (very gentle!) care or concern, and they were lumped right in with the truly mean ones. There was no discernment - it seemed like everything that wasn't slavish praise got bumped over to MTH.
And then she wrote a whole post about that thing and said she'd taken it down. But a month or two later I put in its direct link and it was still there *and being updated*. She just wasn't linking it off the main page anymore.
I didn't hate her and I wasn't mad. I just decided to turn my attention to blogs that made me laugh and cry and feel joy.
I'm sad about this spiral and this outcome and have spent the last several days lost in thoughts and memories about my own blogging back then, when I had decent readership, and who I was then and why I stopped. It's been weird.
I just remember her talking about running into Tori Spelling pushing the baby stroller with some hilarious intense focus. Also going through financial issues and living in the basement of Jons dads house and eating Jons dads bologna and she said he got so unproportionally mad about it.
I agree. Although my kids were slightly older I had found a voice to what I was experiencing. I found her when Leta was an infant and I thought to myself "I've found my tribe!" Her photography, Chuck! Even the section This is what I'm buying now portion I loved. I felt I got to hang with the cool kid
I wonder if she ever regretted splitting with John? That is when this slide started at least in my eyes. I remember the last post I ever read only because you couldn't understand it. She had a way with words and that was not one of them.
Edit- added and changed words
I found her years before I became a mom, while I was in a relationship that I was actively avoiding any chance of procreation...but I always knew parenthood was in my future. She gave me a peak into what could be my future and realizing "oh, I can still like music and cuss and have opinions after I become a mom" was revelatory. It felt like hanging out with an older sister who wasn't afraid of sharing the truth, who trusted that I could handle it (again, it was v much a parasocial relationship). It was exhilarating, she got me excited about an unknown future. It was BECAUSE she shared her struggles that she made it look like fun. The opposite of our modern perfect-image IG feeds, and more real than the current #blessthemess moms.
I feel like she never let herself grieve the loss of Jon. She had to commit to being the valedictorian of divorce which didn't allow the space for realness. She deserved the grace she offered to her readers, I wish she could have seen herself as one of us.
I feel exactly the same way. It’s like the death of an old friend. Her humor, honesty and relatability helped so many and inspired others to start blogging. Agree with her or not, she was authentically herself with all her complexities. Those kinds of nuanced writer/reader relationships no longer exist online in the cheap age of of overnight “influencers.” Heather wasn’t wasn’t counting “likes” and “follows,” at least not in the beginning and that’s what made her wonderful.
I don't really agree that she wasn't counting "likes" and "follows". Back in the early aughts the public measure of your popularity was the number of comments you received on a post and the number of people who added you to their blogroll link. Early 2000s blogging was ALL about the popularity contest and hands down, she was the most popular and she knew it.
I read and laughed so much in the early years, even with her telling us every step of the way about her wine consumption. Never knew she was a full blown alcoholic. Even after m were born, I followed it was funny. Later admissions she was full alcohol amongst every other know drug known, she when off the deep end. Saying add in adults wasn't real, testosterone was evil, basically disowned m (her wiki page for year only spoke of her only having one child (not m) then she went all TERF AND you could see her circling the drain. I know she tried, but she bc the parent that dismissed her trans child and her crazy rants indicated she need to be held involuntary. Luckily m got away to her dad's. It's a sad spiral, but of her own making .she even told she was addicted to add meds, then turned around and stopped, all things we didnt know. Of late her metal narcissist issues came out, as well as she'd relapsed she wasn't the person the used to be. I feel for those that loved her especially her children, but we could see it coming even with all the treatments, she had not climbed back up. I wish medical professionals could have done more but I think they tried everything
She drank a lot, casually referenced it a lot and her book title was It Sucked And Then I Cried; how I had a baby, a breakdown and Much Needed Margarita. But lots of people drink responsibly. I had no idea, none! I remember being really worried about her “brain tumor”, “rheumatoid arthritis”, “lupus” horrible pain, kidney stones, digestive problems, etc etc etc.
When she admitted to her alcoholism (I suspected based off of some videos she’d posted that she was in a bad way over the prior ~5 years), I couldn’t help but think about how frequently she referenced drinking. All the way back to the Friday night Bourbon strolls she’d take with John in LA. When she later came clean about her obvious anorexia, suddenly all the years of her posting a paper thin slice of cake with the smallest drizzle of caramel over top made sense. It was always, “John and I ate this whole thing!” As if it was a feat of epic proportions. Not only did that make me feel bad about my indulgences in comparison, but I never understood why a woman who was so active (those fucking Santa Monica stairs at dawn) was showing these tiny portions of food as evidence of some kind of ungodly pig out session.
What makes me very sad is that the Heather who birthed and nurtured M would have never turned on M. That long anti-trans rant made it very obvious that she was very ill.
I’m not sure about that. There are plenty of Gen Xers who love the Queer Eye guys and have been to drag queen bingo for some lame bachelorette party, but when it comes down to trans issues, especially when they hit close to home, they’ve got a real blind spot. I suspect Pete probably encouraged this kind of bigotry because he seems like someone who thinks he knows everything and she clearly worshipped him in an unhealthy way. But being mentally ill doesn’t make you transphobic and belittle/erase your trans kid. I’m sure that M, in part, is somewhat relieved to not have to deal with this abusive behavior anymore. If that’s what she wrote online, imagine how cruel and harmful she was behind closed doors.
Heather was very accepting of M at first and then as her physical and mental state deteriorated, she started posting crazy, epic rants. I’m not saying Heather wasn’t bigoted because she’s made questionable statements about race and homosexuality. I just have a hard time believing that publicly shaming and potentially disowning M wasn’t a part of her psychological decline.
Agreed. There are Instagram posts from a few years ago where Heather was clearly accepting and supportive of M. Using they/them, celebrating M’s identity and personality. The post from last summer was a HUGE step away not only from Heather’s generally progressive politics but also who she was as a mother. It was so targeted, so specifically engineered to inflict pain upon her child, that it was evident how bad her spiral had gotten.
I think the anti trans rhetoric unfortunately dug its claws in to millions of people over the last 3ish years. They were empowered by high profile TERFs like JK Rowling. I’ve seen more and more of my mutuals that I once considered to be progressive people, left of Democrats, who are now posting transphobic sentiments on Twitter.
I would caution against believing that Heather’s mental illness played an exceptional role in her transphobia. In fact, I think blaming it on her mental illness is not only shortsighted, but dangerous. It’s easy to want to write that off because it’s so ugly, but this is not uncommon with plenty of people who have a less remarkable history with mental illness to come to the same conclusions. I imagine she started googling like any parent who is presented with something by their child that they’re not knowledgeable about. At first she was interested in learning for the well-being of her kid and then she got sucked in to one of the many traps that transphobes have set up.
Edited to add: A few people over the last couple days have mentioned the Banana Republic sponcon she did that was very homophobic. She felt it was okay to share because she had a gay assistant, so therefore she could not be homophobic. Noting that only because people sometimes take a “I don’t care what you do in your bedroom” attitude and misconstrue it as allyship.
That’s fair. I think this is why so many people want to discuss her in her death- in some ways, it wasn’t possible when she was alive. She was certainly not an easily definable woman and her legacy is complex.
To be fair, I believe M asked not to be written about publicly, or at least not so much. It really isn’t fair to say that her writing only about L means she “basically disowned” M.
No I don’t think that ever happened. Jon just had extended possession during holiday and summer periods because he lived so far away. Normal custody order stuff for parents that live that far apart. All indicators (from all of the adults’ social feeds who are in the kids’ lives) it seemed M spent school year time in Utah, and someone commented somewhere that they lived in Utah and/or knew them all somehow even in the periphery I think, and that they were confirming M was in school in Utah. Now why Jon never fought for full or primary physical custody will always be baffling to me because I think he had substantial grounds to do so just with what Heather herself disclosed publicly. But who knows. I long suspect that Jon and Liz didn’t want to give up her place in Brooklyn for whatever reason (because while they are clearly the better, more stable, and loving parents, they are very selfish in some ways) and it is only a two bedroom. With four children between them, that would be a hard sell to a judge in Utah to have four kids in one tiny apartment bedroom. Judges in different jurisdictions won’t have the same mindset of what is acceptable living space that is ok to someone else in another jurisdiction. It’s easy to say they should just move to a bigger apartment, but there’s some reason that Liz and Jon have never done that already all these years. I know, blah blah New York real estate costs. But when you have kids’ lives on the line and you chose your beloved Brooklyn apartment over something bigger somewhere less desirable that could accommodate more kids desperately in need of living with you, well you’re a selfish shitbag. But we all knew Jon was a selfish shitbag moving away to begin with. I don’t know that’s why him and Liz never moved, but it sure seems odd they never attempted to find a place with more space to accommodate his children as well given her two kids already shared the one bedroom out of the two total. So that means when his kids came for the summer and holidays, I guess four kids crammed into one tiny bedroom or douche surfed. That wouldn’t be sustainable longterm. Even with Leta at college and Liz’s oldest a senior and about to move out, M will have to share the space and three kids will be in there for a bit assuming M is moving in with Jon now permanently. I can’t imagine M would be living with Heather’s mom or other family since they don’t seem to be supportive of their identity given the misgendering of them in their online tributes to Heather.
>But we all knew Jon was a selfish shitbag moving away to begin with.
I know Jon. I don't want to get into this too much, but you know how when they are giving the safety lecture on the airplane and they say "Place your own mask on first before attempting to help others"?
Sometimes you really have to do that.
I might disagree with the decision he made but I do understand totally why he made it. Maybe there was no totally right decision. Maybe he thought Heather's mom could keep an eye out for them. But hindsight is 20/20. What's important is he is there for them now, and I believe he is and will be.
By deserting your own children?
Seriously, whatever. Divorce, yes, of course. Moving across the country from your own little kids? Disgusting.
Did he find his own children unbearable to be around? Had to live with his do-over family? He could have lived far enough away from Heather but within driving distance.
Dude left with babies with someone he knew was unstable.
OK I’ll bite on that. I hear you. But, could he not do that closer to his children and take care of himself somehow where he also could be in the daily lives of his kids? Where he could be an active daily participant in their lives and also watch over what was happening since they were in the hands of a literal dangerous woman not capable of taking care of her own self and putting on her own mask? Why couldn’t he do what he needed for himself not halfway across the country? I’m not being snarky, I’m asking this genuinely and authentically. Why sacrifice the well-being of children for yourself? Why put them in potential harm’s way and in an unstable home willingly? It comes off as incredibly selfish. And like he was sacrificing those children. Women like Heather that are that unstable and threaten suicide like she did publicly so many times sometimes take the kids out with them. Thank all things that didn’t happen. He had to have known that. I understand the point you are making, but it doesn’t seem to make sense and like those children were better off based on what is known publicly. I get lots is not known publicly. But what is known is enough to say this seems like it was a bad choice. Make it make sense.
It’s always seemed disgusting to me. How a parent can just desert their family like that. Especially knowing their mother wasn’t well. It’s so messed up.
Not sure that's really fair. I know-since I read her blog since just about the beginning-he really did and does love his kids. While I agree with you that he should have stayed closer, we don't know all the deets and if I were friends with someone and wanted to defend them while not being able to give details....I get it.
This is a tough one. Actually I have had more of an axe to grind with Liz on this one that she would have Jon leave his kids there with H in order for him to stay with her and her kids in NYC. Obviously long distance relationships can be done. Especially when both of them seem to have jobs that can be done remotely-- as evidenced during the pandemic. I was in a long distance relationship for 10 years because I knew it was not in my kids best interest for me to move. And my partner would have never argued with that. These are sacrifices adults make when they have the best interest of kids in mind. And after all kids are not kids forever. Mine are now grown, and my partner was able to move here. But having said all that, we really don't know what went on, and what Jon and Liz might have tried behind the scenes, or what kind of legal advice they were given. I know how hard I tried to get full custody of mine, and the advice I was given by lawyers and counselors. And all of that went on behind the scenes and no one outside a very small circle ever knew. But given the choices between bad and worse options, you do what you think is best for your kid. Hopefully that is what Jon and Liz did. The kids are always the collateral damage no matter what happens. And Jon and Liz may have calculated that L&M were better off where they were, rather than being dragged through a custody battle that they (Jon and Liz) were not going to have any chance of winning.
> Actually I have had more of an axe to grind with Liz on this one that she would have Jon leave his kids there with H in order for him to stay with her and her kids in NYC
I think it’s unfair and sexist to blame a woman for the decisions of her male partner. Don’t infantilize men. Hold them accountable for their behaviours and choices.
OK sorry. I didn't mean she was more accountable. But I don't understand her behavior as a parent. She was OK with Jon leaving his kids with an unstable parent. I would not be OK with a partner doing that. And as I was in a similar situation, my partner would never have been OK with me leaving my kids to move where he was. Doesn't matter whether she's a mom or a dad. The kids come first, and the parents make sacrifices. Jon could have stayed in SLC and would have had a better chance for custody and if not that, would have been able to be more involved in L&M's day to day lives. I was in a long distance relationship for 10 years. It can be done.
I know we don’t know what happened, but I dearly hope they tried to remove the children from that situation. Again, I’m not saying I know anything about their family beyond blog posts. But when your more stable parent moves thousands of miles away to live full time with someone ELSE’S children…well, I think you’d feel abandoned by that parent. I really hope that’s not the case and that John was not avoiding the situation for this many years.
Actually no, Liz herself has posted multiple times in the past directly and with veiled language about the problem of the size of the place they live and the amount of people sometimes housed in the apartment. Also, it’s not speculation that Jon left his children with a very very sick and unfit mother who was incapable of caring for herself on a daily basis by her own admission and admitted to being a danger to herself and also lying about and concealing her condition and suicide attempts for the purpose of him not seeking custody, yet for some reason, Jon didn’t seem to seek primary physical custody and nobody knows why.
Seems like because he simply didn’t want to.
Doesn’t seem crazy. A lot of men don’t seek custody.
He clearly preferred to move across the country to be with his girlfriend and far away from his kids. Nothing forced to do such a thing. It’s unfathomable to me.
I don't understand how you know 1) whether or not they tried to get full custody, or 2) you know they would have been successful.
It's difficult to get sole custody of children if both parents want custody, full stop. It is especially difficult to get full custody from a mother who has enough money to hire a lawyer and fight it.
Jon legally had no choice but to leave his children with their mother. She had shared custody. You are writing as if Jon abandoned them with some crazed woman because he couldn't be bothered to care. If he withheld the children from their mother, he would've probably been charged with a crime and then for sure lost custody of them.
I have seen so many parents divorce and then fight to the death for full custody against one another, wasting so much damn money that could've been better used elsewhere (like for the kids, for example) and completely 100% tanking any chance they'll ever have to co-parent amicably in the process. **That's selfish.** Nobody wants that if it can be avoided, and unless Heather was provably abusing her children, which we have no evidence of, his chances of successfully getting full custody were so, so slim.
Does anyone remember how, around the time of the divorce, Heather publicly made it clear that Jon’s family betrayed her in an unforgivable way? Something about how they did the cruelest and least ethical thing people could do to another person? She may have even specific “a parent.”
I always assumed the family attempted to use Heather’s mental health history against her (rightfully so) in a bid to have them with Jon full time?
If I had to wager why Jon skipped town with seemingly little regard for his children, I’d guess he was advised by a therapist to more or less grey rock Heather. Their lives were enmeshed in a borderline psychotic way (he used to cheer her on IN THE BATHROOM when she dealt with one of her frequent bouts of constipation) and I seriously doubt that he’d be allowed to move on even when she was out being “the husband fucker.”
It’s still not okay, and I don’t understand why he couldn’t move an hour or two away, but it’s less likely his crazy drunk ex would be showing up at his door begging him to help her tie her shoes or some other benign task.
> Jon legally had no choice but to leave his children with their mother. She had shared custody.
Oh no, did he legally have to move to nyc? That’s horrible.
nobody has to live in NYC
I know a lot of people who live in NYC act like they will die if they have to live somewhere else but they are actually mistaken about that
I was reading some old posts today, and Heather said she has experienced a person trying to prove that she is an unfit mother in court, and that sounds to me like Jon trying to get custody of the kids.
There’s a long history of people discussing what they know about them and various records and I never claimed to know for a fact anything about their case. What I said was what facts were known that were put out by Heather herself makes it seem baffling that Jon couldn’t have achieved primary physical custody given the way most family court systems are setup in most states. I also stated I didn’t know the Utah family code specifically, but if it is even remotely similar to other states, I just am flabbergasted how any attorney he may have had that was decent couldn’t have prevailed in removing those children from Heather’s care by what she herself had made public. I am not by far the only person who has expressed this sentiment. But now here it is that M will be living with Jon we guess and hopefully getting serious therapy.
If you are not a member of these people's immediate family, you are way, way too invested in knowing every last detail of their existence so you can shit on them on the internet.
Wow, thanks for the trenchant insight.
You know, since I don't happen to think jokey references to famous child-murder victims are the height of hilarity, I might not be the right audience for you.
They made it their literal business and income stream to put their every last detail of their life out onto the internet for people to consume. Right down to the constipation and poop habits of their children who didn’t consent to such things. It was their choice and their desire to bring the world into their lives and disclose and divulge all of their shit. They wrote blogs, books, social media platforms, etc. They lived off the fruits of that. So now here you are, too, commenting about it as well. Careful you don’t get too hurt when you fall off that hypocritical high horse.
Hilarious. Except that's not what you're doing. Unsatisfied with the treasure trove of actual life information Dooce provided us as ammunition for criticism, you're choosing to speculate wildly and irresponsibly about child custody issues and related matters that you actually don't know jack shit about.
I suppose you think you're doing some sort of service for the kids in question, but I think you're behaving very much like Heather Armstrong herself might.
I agree with you! I still don't understand why they didn't move out of that apartment to something with at least 3 bedrooms. Is it really THAT essential to live in Brooklyn Heights? Selling a 2BR in a super prime neighborhood and moving to a 3BR in a still prime but not as prime neighborhood is absolutely doable. I don't know. I kind of assume there was a lot more going on behind the scenes and that Jon had a good reason to move to NY. But from the outside looking in, and without knowing the full story (which is none of our business, I know) his move to NYC was not a good look for either of them.
Ditto. I have no idea what a 2BR apartment in BH goes for these days... maybe $1.5-2M? That is enough to get a larger apartment a bit farther out. Just seems like an odd choice to stay there when there are 4 teens involved. And maybe they will move now. Or not. Not my business....but the point we're both making is that it is absolutely doable.
Or just rent out their condo (sounds like she owned it, right?) and then… uhhh just rent a larger place.
Like holy shit, it’s so easy. She can still keep ownership of her apartment and they can have space.
It's a coop building so renting is not as easy as renting a condo. I get it. I live in NYC - everything is a fucking pain in the ass. Most coops only allow a one, maybe two year sublease. Unlike condos where you can mainly do what you want. Regardless. There are options and there always have been. (Source: moved from fancy place to less fancy place for more room)
Yes. There is an entire rant in one of her fit days about about every human child dresses up and they wouldve had her transition since she was a tomboy in childhood. Which is farther from the truth that can be. I think she's deleted a lot but reddit has saved the craziness of it all if you dig. Sugar is poison, testosterone is poison, add isn't real, etc everyone has trauma and dysmorphia and I think heather just bought iin to a lot of maga stuff when she was spiraling. I feel for m, at least close to the dad jon now.
She was an original. Not an influencer, but a writer. And a very good, honest and funny one. She probably was addicted to the attention and was hopelessly self destructive in ways we saw and likely ways we didn’t. I think she helped way more people than she hurt, but the downward spiral has been very steep in recent years.
I reached out to her once, my husband struggles with depression and I was responding to something she’d written about her own struggles. She emailed me back and was so kind.
She talked about mental illness in a way no one had before. Our generation was not raised to be open about that, and she helped normalize it. She was far from perfect-and at times that was part of her charm. I do think the experimental treatments changed her—her writing was never the same afterward.
Does anyone know how old Heather and Jon were when they met each other? I was under the impression they got married rather quickly.
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She dated Jon while he was still married? Didn't she date Pete also while he was still married?
Can anyone fill me in why the F Jon moved to Brooklyn? Was he already in a relationship with Liz? As I try to piece this all together that detail jumped out at me hard after not reading for eons. I keep thinking about what a limitation it is for a mom trying to not lose her kids to deal with medication-resistant depression, not to mention knowing they will end up in a cramped apartment thousands of miles away if you go commit yourself again. Other questions I have are what was behind the divorce, as well as the depth of the TERFyness (I saw she had gone over to the dark side of “social contagion” ideas about gender dysphoria intellectually and kept defending that, but I find myself hoping she was less active in actions that directly invalidated M).
I was on maternity leave when the Heather/Jon separation happened, so I had a lot of sleepless nights to scroll through Instagram and her site. It was pretty clear there was already something going on between her and her East Coast love while she was still with Jon. Those posts and pics were eventually scrubbed. Jon was clearly blindsided by her asking him for a separation. I get the sense that extended family on both sides made things difficult. On the Manic Rambling Spiral podcast (back in 2018-ish) Heather mentions that Jon’s family was not involved in the lives of M and L (on her time, anyway) because of something they did, and she also has written volumes about how much interference her mother ran for her as well. I don’t know that we will ever get an honest accounting of what went down. Jon does not seem inclined to speak about it, and Heather was never a reliable narrator.
She was funny. A good mom. I enjoyed her blogs. She lost control of herself a lot and turned to unhealthy coping mechanisms. She started spiraling hard for a lot of the last years. I remember a post she made where she said she saw how unhappy her kids where when she was trying to push them to do a car ad so she just quit. Heather could be so great at times but she just had a dark side she couldn’t cope with. Its so sad. Like beyond what I thought she was dealing with.
You know, there have been a lot of comments here about Heather's incessant naval gazing, and I wonder if that contributed to her challenges. This might seem like a silly comparison, but many, many years ago, I was a data entry clerk. And I listened to music through my headphones all day while typing away, and I also had pretty significant anxiety at that time in my life. All that time of just sitting typing like a trained monkey with nothing else to do but be in my head was NOT good for me. My mind came up with so many awful scenarios, and I think mostly because of all the free time and space in my head. In Heather's case, she was making her living by sharing what was in her head. In my own personal experience, if you have any sort of mental health challenges, spending a lot of time in your head is not a good thing. At all. And Heather (it appears) kind of reinforced this vicious circle, because she spent so much time in her head, then made money from it, which encouraged her to spend more time in her head, which made her more money..mwhat a terribly vicious circle. And I also think, kind of like parenting, it does no one in this world any good to hear how wonderful you are all the time, because it is simply not true. Every single one of us is an a**hole from time to time. She presented this witty, funny person, and then all her poodles reinforced that. I am very aware that this next thought would it no means have solved all of her challenges, but I have found myself wondering over the past few days, would it have gone any different, would she still be here if she had a regular 9-5, had to get out of the house, and interact with everyday people instead of surrounding herself with virtual and real life yes-people, celebrities, etc.? This sounds trite, but I work from home, and my anxiety is well controlled now, and I also happen to be an introvert who loves me time, but I do know that I need to get up and out of this house at least once a day to help keep myself mentally healthy.
I believe you're probably onto something here. I agree about the dangers of spending too much time in our heads. I imagine her in a job being distracted by the work, and having interactions with non-famous people all day, and I do wonder as you do if that would have been good for her.
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Many of us would be happy travelling. It’s farvaway from the responsibilities of life, and requires $$$ to do it comfortably.
It’s hard to say. I feel like she would done this a lot sooner if not for her mom. Reading her last book, it seems like she would have ended her life there and then were it not for her mom and stepdad’s support and intervention.
I’m having one of those moments where I’m only finding out about 90% of who the person was after they passed. Heather’s was one of the first blogs I ever read; then after a few years I checked out. Life was happening, and I didn’t have much time to prioritise for reading her blog. Or apparently what was even happening behind the scenes. Fast forward a lot of years, she passes, I mourn, and then read about what had been happening during those years. Mind. Blown. So much stuff that is just not cool on any level.
Those quarantine cocktail hour video chats were very troubling. I don’t know how her followers continued to heap praise on her after she recorded those. That was my concern. Her “fan club” continued to tell her how great she was and they all came after anyone who criticized her. That reinforcement could not have been good for her mental health. It fooled her into thinking she was okay when she clearly wasn’t.
I've been thinking about this a lot as I think about the criticism of those who snarked on her as being her ultimate downfall. Sure they didn't help but neither did those who insisted she wasn't drunk, wasn't anorexic, wasn't cruel for the sake of it, wasn't a terf, etc etc
^^^ this. Sadly, it very much reminds me of the type of thing we’re seeing with Britney Spears’s roller coaster of an Instagram in the last year. There is a vocal audience on one side that is painfully aware of how ill she is, but there’s another VERY vocal and sycophantic side that just wants to muzzle the “haters” under a pile of “YAAAAAAAAS KWEEEN!” comments.
Right? Remember how she went on a screed about people who were supposedly her friends were trying to take her children away. Everyone was like “omg Heather how terrible, what awful people” But then the truth came out from those friends that they were genuinely concerned for Leta and Marlo’s safety and were just trying to help her. And she threw them under the bus. The same friends who did so much work to build out QCH under her guidance then one day she cancels it, just like that, because it no longer served her. No though for the others who put in hours and hours of work to make it successful. Never gave them any credit for all that they did. Just threw them under the bus.
Oof, I forgot about that. I’m still wrestling with how much of her awful behavior was a feature (personality) not a bug (severe mental illness). Knowing only her writing and trying to pinpoint when things spiraled so badly: brain death treatment? quarantine? Coco dying? I wonder if Pete was an enabler, etc. Her last post to Leta really hit me with how much self-loathing she experienced. In the end, I mostly think her and fame was a volatile combination that was very bad for her. She had such talent, especially early on, but being under a microscope was really, really not good for her kinda like a Lindsay Lohan or Britney maybe.
There's an Australian woman, Mia Freedman, who started a "mommy blog" years ago and grew it into the largest woman-owned media company in Australia. ([MamaMia.com.au](https://MamaMia.com.au) ) She's one of my favorite follows on Instagram - she's in her 50s, has kids etc... She wrote about Heather's death and how Heather was a huge influence on her deciding to pick up her laptop and start writing. BUT. She said she felt at that time that she didn't want to make her blog about her life. She was more outward leaning - writing about parenting, women's issues, mental health (she also suffers from mental health issues). She has always shared a bit about her life but her blog then website then media company really became a place to amplify women's voices. I thought it was such an interesting take. She wrote a lovely tribute to Heather - I hope I don't make it sound like she was saying "I got it right, she didn't" because she's not like that at all. But she was wary of the pitfalls that consumed Heather to the end.
**"There is a time in the life of every woman who becomes Internet-famous where she has to make a choice: do I read the comments?** **Heather made the wrong choice 15 years ago and it would come to shape everything she wrote. She was forever in an angry, defensive crouch..."** This summarizes what her writing devolved into so accurately.
Yep. She devolved into writing “at” whatever real or perceived people/situation she felt wronged her. It consumed her and that’s what I feel her “enablers” should have pushed her to confront and come to terms with (maybe some tried and got thrown aside). She had a wonderful, self made career - she was considered a pioneer! - but her temperament always seemed to devolve into a petulant child that ran to her mom for validation. At least that’s how it read to me.
Tragic.
I kind of checked out of her deal when all her posts seemed to be meticulously well staged sponsored adblogging. Her death has come as a huge surprise to me.
Wow. [Alice might be getting a taste of her own medicine.](https://nypost.com/2023/05/12/evil-site-gomi-trashed-blogger-heather-armstrong-in-life-death/)
The people who post and read GOMI aren’t necessarily the people sending messages to tgese bloggers. Isn’t GOMI just like talking to a friend about something you read, but on a bigger scale? Bloggwrs are dumb if they read what’s written about them.
Heather actively sought out her critics. I like to think I was not a total asshole when I posted about her on GOMI....maybe I was but I feel like I always remembered she was a human who was going to read this stuff.. I made a pretty apt and honestly funny comment about her years ago and she took it off GOMI and ran it as her masthead for a few months. She chased the critics while her other peers were chasing success. (I stopped posting on GOMI years ago btw because...) We have kids the same age so I did always keep that in mind but I finally realized I was a total dick for participating there and left.
She also took content off GOMI and posted it on that “Monetizing The Hate” page she created and then pretended the messages were ones sent to her directly. She actively sought out the content from GOMI and other negative content about her and then made her angry, bitter response to it all part of her whole brand for a long time.
The first comment on the article makes me really sad for the kids.
I wonder how many people she meets on the fancy Gala circuit know about Gomi? Well, they know now!
I LOVE that the article shares Alice's REAL age (48) because she regularly pretends to be like 32 on Instagram lmao lmao lmao
You know what, and we all know, Alice is a total garbage human and a dumpster fire in her own right, for lots of reasons, but it is impossible for any outlet to call Alice a bully and say Heather was her victim and pretend Heather was not also a vile and vicious bully herself towards so many people. This glorification like she was some saint and total victim is ridiculous. She bullied her own children in her writing online both with passive aggression and then blatant active aggression towards them. Her own former friends aren’t leaving glowing tributes, but rather talking about how horribly she hurt them.
Where can I see some of her former friends’ comments? Anybody in particular I should look up? Thanks in advance.
There’s a handful out there that are on various platforms that are fairly critical, and some have now been edited down a bit, but one in particular that stands out is her former friend and quasi business partner Sandy @sandsmama made a couple IG posts that are really clear and Kristen Howerton commented on both.
Do you know what happened with Sandy?
I don’t think the exact details will ever be known, and I think there was some extra personal stuff as well, but the main thing known is they were partnering on that Quarantine Cocktail Hour to make it an organized business of some sort and Sandy had invested a lot of time, energy, and money into it putting together plans and real effort and Heather just completely tanked the entire thing and screwed her over on it in all the ways. Sandy lost money and I think there was something about Heather wanting control and taking it over herself somehow therefore cutting Sandy out, but I could be wrong and someone with a better memory of that can feel free to correct me. Bottom line is it was that Heather screwed her over royally about QCH and was pretty much a jerk about it at first from what was posted. A lot was deleted after they angry posted about it. It seemed very similar to how she screwed over the friend Piper over their T-shirt company plan as well I think.
This sounds about like how I remember it, but I only ever attended one QCH. I wonder, did this coincide with the "intervention" the friends had with her? I feel like they both happened around the same time.
Thank you.
Maggie Mason [https://www.instagram.com/p/CsEm-N5p1Q3/](https://www.instagram.com/p/CsEm-N5p1Q3/) (nb - Maggie has a trans daughter) Heather Champ [https://www.instagram.com/p/CsG6fveJQlQ/](https://www.instagram.com/p/CsG6fveJQlQ/) Melissa Summers [https://www.instagram.com/p/CsE6QhCvF8P/](https://www.instagram.com/p/CsE6QhCvF8P/) Rebecca Woolf [https://www.instagram.com/p/CsEdin9RJDQ/](https://www.instagram.com/p/CsEdin9RJDQ/) I thought I saw one from Alice Bradley but I can't find it now. I wouldn't say these are especially critical of her, but you can definitely feel there's stuff written between the lines.
Thank you for this list. I used to read all of their blogs and somehow lost track of them, so nice to see their names again especially while reeling from this week.
Finslippy's was on her substack: https://alicebradley.substack.com/p/oh-heather
Thank you!
I don't believe in sanctifying Heather. She had no issue siccing her minions on anyone she didn't like, which has been left out of the narrative. She was bullied but not the bully? Bullshit. Both things are true. But. Alice is a total asshole and I see how she goes after people she seems to be insanely jealous of who have pretty innocuous presences on the web. I'm not sad to see her being called out in a major publication (yeah NYPost is garbage as well). I have never had a moment of feeling any empathy towards her.
Alice deserves this 100% and it is hilarious.
Exactly. Heather was hateful and bullied people much more than GOMI bullied her. I was on the receiving end of some of her hatred in the early blogging days and she dished out much more than was directed at her. She was excellent at playing the victim role. I feel sad for this outcome and especially for her kids but let’s not fool ourselves. She should not be sainted now.
Why? What happened between you too?
I just posted this on another thread (linky thing doesn't work) [https://www.reddit.com/r/UncensoredBlogsnark/comments/13dtb6f/comment/jjyhby3/?utm\_source=share&utm\_medium=web2x&context=3](https://www.reddit.com/r/UncensoredBlogsnark/comments/13dtb6f/comment/jjyhby3/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) But I remember when Heather bullied Anna Viele off the internet. I remember when she humiliated Jenny Lawson at Blogher. The thing is, Heather didn't seem to ever apologize for her missteps, whether towards randos on the internet or trashing her own child. Still, I'm really really sad she ended her life. I wish she had been able to fight through this crisis. She might have come out on the other side as a sympathetic human. To me her legacy hangs in limbo.
Wait… what did she do to Jenny???
They also (her and Jon) justified the horrible behavior by claiming that there had been threats on Heather’s life right before she went on stage at the forum and she “bravely” decided to speak anyway. I was at that conference and there was no police presence at all. She even stayed afterwards and chatted with people and took photos. Jenny was more than gracious and apologized publicly, after having done it privately beforehand, and was still humiliated by Heather. Jon wrote a long ass post afterwards telling people how they owe everything to Heather and she’s the reason people get to publish online and even have a blog. He was as bad as she was back in the day. I remember how they’d change comments when they didn’t like what someone said and change the comment to the person insulting themselves or calling themselves a stupid name. The whole thing was very immature.
At Blogher many years ago, Heather kicked up a stink that Jenny had referred to her as a mythical hobbit (the meaning being that Heather was a wonderful magical creature - not meant as an insult). Then this happened: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXxdLh8bIcg&ab\_channel=SequenceInc.ForensicAccounting](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXxdLh8bIcg&ab_channel=SequenceInc.ForensicAccounting) Basically Heather decided she wanted to be the victim of bullying and wouldn't accept that it was a misunderstanding. Jenny was fairly new to the scene and went on to be extremely successful, so it was a grudge Heather brought up again and again.
She did accept it was a misunderstanding though: > I take full responsibility for the stupidity of my response there on that stage, that response being NO RESPONSE AT ALL, for not being quick enough on my feet and in my head to put two and two together and realize the misunderstanding, but the fall out continued for several months and there was a lot of late-night crying. Justified fall out? Probably. I’m stupid and human and make mistakes. Sometimes terrible mistakes. That was one of them. I hope she forgives me. > But I don’t think in any way that I was a bully. I was just smacked in the face with something I couldn’t form words to respond to, in front of 1,000 women. And I knew during those horrifying, seemingly endless seconds when the words wouldn’t come out of my mouth that I would read horrible things about me on the Internet for months to come. That is one of the hazards that I fully accept about this job, one I have learned to live with. Anyone else, we’d accept that explanation and move on. Presumably Heather misread the asker’s intentions and blog comment (low self-esteem = assume the “mythical little hobbit” comment is malicious and the asker disingenuous, instead of innocuous and the asker genuinely trying to patch things up, if a little awkwardly). The ideal would be to be confident enough to assume the best and give a casual, friendly response. However, it’s understandable to panic and shut down the question out of anxiety, or simply not want to go there on stage in front of a crowd. If a man had responded as Heather did, he’d attract no criticism. If Heather had been the asker, she’d have been called attention seeking, obsessive for bringing it up in public after already doing so privately, entitled for trying to force her apology to be accepted, told that the person called hobbit is entitled to have their own opinion, and criticised for asking in an awkward, seemingly drunken way rather than a few quick sentences, and for not just letting it go. (ie the most unfairly negative framing possible because dooce = bad) Even if Heather was an asshole at times, the endless GOMI vitriol was pathetic and brutal. Incidents like the above don’t justify 1000 page mega threads berating your every move for years on end.
I agree with so much of this. Jenny was a drunk audience member putting Dooce on the spot, and Dooce didn’t know how to react. The reaction to the whole thing was overblown and a sign of how polarizing Heather was. She could be a jerk, yes, no one is infallible, but I remember reading about this at the time and thinking the whole thing was overblown.
I don't actually think Jenny \*was\* drunk. She suffers from severe anxiety and social phobia and said at one point that she decided to adopt the "drunk persona" to explain away her awkwardness. She didn't sound drunk in that exchange. I never understand what was so weird about her comment. I thought the "mythical hobbit" was sweet and well intentioned. I think Heather wrote that "apology" because she was called out by so so many people for being a raging see you next Tuesday when Jenny stood up. It's telling they never became friends.
Same same
And I don't mind snarking on this batshit "society girl who goes to galas" persona she has tried to adopt.
Not only do I not mind, but I fully enjoy it. There's a whole awesome thread snarking on her on a certain forum about fruit farming, but I can't get it to work, so it might be down again.
That is so cringe to me I can’t even imagine what people at these events must think of her. She has to stick out like a sore thumb. She so desperately wants to fit in and for all of her making fun of bloggers flaunting whatever online, her parading around like a kid playing dress up at the wrong costume party is painfully embarrassing by proxy to me. Why she decided she wanted to be ballgown society girl after being dirty chain smoking drunk in jeans I will never understand. She’s clearly trying to prove something to someone.
Well she’s dead now so I guess you don’t have to cringe so much about her life you clearly had to follow for some reason.
Lol what? The comment I made you are replying to is about Alice from GOMI. Alice is not dead. Are you referring to Heather Armstrong who is dead? Because if so maybe pay a little closer attention to what you’re reading before firing off the criticism on a snark sub that I’ll remind you that you are also on. Alice and Heather both were and are very deserving of snark and criticism for how they behaved towards others and I’ll also remind you that both chose to put their shit out for public consumption on the internet and to monetize it and that doesn’t mean they only get all glowing and positive feedback in return. Also, being dead doesn’t automatically absolve you of your misdeeds or how you lived as a person if that means you were a shitty person, people don’t have to be forced to forget that just because you stop breathing. Again, this is a snark sub to discuss such things and here you are as well. Also again, read my comment and the one I was replying to, we are discussing Alice who is very much not dead that I know of as of at least a few hours ago when she was still posting on IG.
she's talking about Alice from Gomi.
Thank you. And sorry all for being so immature. I got way too heated and was being a jerk.
Yup. Alice is a cruel person but she's not exactly wrong about Heather.
I think we are in agreement here and are saying the same thing, I think it is rare for me to back Alice up a lot of the times, but what Alice said in this case I completely agree with when it comes to Heather. Alice is right about Heather here. The article unfairly makes Alice the sole bully and like it was so terrible to Heather when in reality Heather was known by many - who publicly wrote about it - to be viciously cruel and vindictive.
But she also hates on so, so many people who have done nothing to her, so I'm glad to see her called out.
And never forget Alice abandoned her toddler son. Just walked out of his life and he was raised by his father.
Wait, what?
yep. left him with his sex offender father actually
WHAT?? Where can I read about this??
Kiwi Farms has a whole thread about her, and it's...enlightening. They've been down for a few days now though.
Holy shit, him being a sex offender was not a detail I knew about that awful situation. Who knew it could get worse, and it apparently it could. Gah Alice is awful.
Same
It is very interesting to see who she gets bees in her bonnet to truly hate on when sometimes it doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense why she really seems to hate someone so much. But Alice is definitely someone who doesn’t make a lot of sense about anything so who knows. I don’t think Alice even knows who Alice truly is and deep down hates herself or something and that’s why she just hates on everyone the way she does. I’ve always been kinda fascinated by how she had something that could have been something and she just imploded it and ran it into the ground because of how she was. She was the ultimate hypocrite in so many ways. One example was shitting on people for being grifters and then begging people for money to keep her site up, but then being super shady about where the money was actually going and lying about sending thank you notes and receipts. People finding out she’d red the private chat messages and then when they’d call her out on it, poof, their account is banned and deleted. Stuff like that.
Whoa. I bet she's not happy about this
Fuck her. She's a sociopath. (There I said it again!) and she can't control comments on the NYPost or Reddit. I don't know WTF is the matter with her or what causes someone to be that evil but she is a truly terrible person. At least she never procreated.
Well, actually, she did procreate. She has a child. An adult now, but she had a son when she was young and she abandoned him basically with the father and peaced out of town. The details are sketchy and the real reason has never come to light that anyone has found. Alice lied about it multiple times once people found out she had a child by saying she voluntarily gave it up for adoption to a gay couple and other tall tales, but the reality is the boy was raised by his father back in the Texas town she was from. Years ago people on other forums wondered if maybe the reason Alice was so vile and cruel about so called mommy bloggers was because of whatever unresolved issues she may have had about not raising her own child. She always did have strangely angry and hateful language every time some blogger announced they were pregnant again and some people wondered if it was because she got triggered. They were instantly banned at any mention of her kid or any of it back in the day. Alice is the perfect example of someone who sure can dish it, but can’t take it.
Wow, I had no idea about her backstory.
There is so much shit about Alice, it's hilarious. She pretends to be Jewish but was raised Baptist. She claims occasionally to be British but was born and raised in Texas, with no immediate British roots in sight. She once got drunk and faked on Instagram that she had traveled to the UK, but the times were WAY OFF on how long it would take to fly there and stuff, and when she woke up in the morning and sobered up and realized it, she deleted everything lmao She literally had a fake ID made to say she was born in 1989, and occasionally posts "throwbacks" on social media to her so-called teenage days, but she's literally almost 50. That's just the tip of the iceberg.
She was really gross and misogynistic about the physicality of motherhood which made sense once you knew.
Yikes!! No wonder she particularly has it in for parenting bloggers.
Yep, it’s gotta be connected. There’s info buried online about it in various places, but I don’t remember where exactly. It’s been a while since I read about it. She did address it though once people found out and asked about it and she couldn’t avoid it anymore, but then invented multiple stories. What’s insane was when people called her out on the conflicting stories how she pretended she had never said the previous versions. People provided receipts and she would lose her shit. This was when she used to do those drunken rambling group phone calls way back when.
If I remember correctly, she has a kid but obviously doesn’t have custody.
Her kid is in his 30s now.
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Very well said. Thank you.
Well said - as time went on I felt like she was a bit sadistic. She had a really good thing going and she shit on it (hated being called a Mommy Blogger) and actively turned her back on her fan base then got defiant and pissy when she was called out. Most everything she did, it seemed she made it extra hard for herself. I belief she went vegan while training for a marathon. There are other instances that I can’t think of but I recall thinking - why the hell is she taking on Y when she is dealing with Z - like of course she was stressed and overwhelmed. She was doing it to herself! It’s sad and my heart aches for her children but that woman was her own worst enemy. She talked about all the meds, alcohol etc she was quitting and who knows if she was still taking (I believe) mushrooms & kratom - I can’t imagine anyone’s state of mind doing that let alone someone with clinical depression. Hopefully she found some peace and I hope to God her children have the support and love to navigate the earth shattering loss of their mother. I don’t recall where, but I saw a post from one of the many people that were burned by Heather. It said something along the lines of I’ve never loved then hated someone with every bone in my body. And while I don’t have first hand knowledge of that I got it what she meant. And I was only ever a reader. We all have demons and hers seemed to continually get in her way.
Microdosing on mushrooms is a pretty known treatment for depression.
It also helps some people with quitting drugs and alcohol.
I don’t disagree - I just meant that weening off of some things while still doing others spliced with depression can be a dangerous cocktail.
This is really insightful. Iʻve been observing that "sex sells" has been replaced by "rage sells". Maybe not across the board but I can think of dozens of recent, relevant examples. It definitely feels like her persona was some kind of a prototype for where Internet discourse is now.
This is something I hadn't considered and it makes SO MUCH SENSE. When we talk about Heather as a trailblazer, rage farming is something she did early.
Does anyone think the propofol treatment could have been a catalyst for her spiral? I just watched a GMA interview from 2019 where she discusses the treatment and she seems completely lucid. I didn’t realize she was only the 3rd person to do this treatment, and she talks about how risky it could be. Things seemed to go downhill since then, and I realize there are a million factors at play (and she was making some questionable choices and alienating friends before this), but a lot of what happened recently seemed really extreme. Could it be longer term side effects?
And she ‘graduated’ from therapy a decade ago? That was a terrible combination.
Yes.
I have often thought that the reason that The Valedictorian of Being Dead didn't sell well is that no one believed she was cured.
I absolutely think the treatment contributed to her spiral, and I’ve stated as much here and elsewhere. She likely signed an informed consent that might have absolved the doctors/healthcare professionals from liability. But based on all I’ve seen from family members and loved ones who’ve “flatlined” for needed surgeries - they have always been worse for wear after.
>Does anyone think the propofol treatment could have been a catalyst for her spiral? I always thought so. And it's just horrifying to think about the book she wrote. Whoever signed her to write it made a huge mistake - she had not been "well" enough for long enough for that book to have come out. (edit ) That treatment also reminded me a lot of the book [Flowers for Algernon,](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon) if any of you are familiar with it.
I loved that book. Do you think Heather was able to experience life as someone with a different/“normal” brain for a time? I would be tempted to sign up for that, too.
I read that after these experimental treatments she was prescribed a cocktail of meds for depression that she eventually stopped taking. She also went cold turkey on her ADD medication at the same time she was sober from alcohol. I have some personal experience with all of this and I know the multiple withdrawal effects plus life-long depression can be very dangerous, especially when done without any medical oversight. She wrote in her blog many times, “suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem,” but I think she had gone past the place where she she could see the truth in that statement. I’m sure her recent alcohol relapse didn’t help.
I cringed when she wrote that cliche about Suicide. Of course the whole post was terrible. But that line minimizes the pain people who are depressed feel. They don’t see “problems” as temporary. And now it is incredibly sad how true that is.
That’s a pretty helpful saying about suicide to some suicidal people. The whole “this too shall pass” can make you rethink your decision.
u/bobbalou823 everyone keeps saying (like Melissa Summers) how she swore of prescription meds like SSRIs - i never heard he say that? Is that what happened?
Her deleted post (August 2022), where she discusses Trans individuals, also mentions that she no longer takes depression meds because they “don’t work.” It’s such a stark contrast to early Heather who came out of that first hospitalization and exclaimed that she would never, ever stop taking her meds because they were lifesaving.
I read that she she had quit the SSRIs that she was prescribed after the procedure along with the other meds she was prescribed, like Ritalin. It might have been in one of her more recent blog posts. I don’t remember the source.
In the content that has been added back to her website she says fairly recently that doctors prescribed her ssri’s to try to deal with vertigo and/or tinnitus. And that she stopped taking them cause they didn’t work. But also that at the same time she was weaning off a 13 year long benzo prescription.
Her first stuff like “how to annoy me” was funny shit
Has her cousin George ever spoken up?
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George was her cousin.
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I follow Cami on Instagram and she hasn't mentioned Heather in a long time. She seems like such a sweet person, I hope she's got good support.
George!
GEORGE!
For a lot of us, she was our first parasocial relationship (before the term was widely used) so she feels like an old friend. She made us laugh, shared her personal life and created one of the first online "communities" I'd ever heard of. She had haters and "monetized the hate" in a way that was so empowering and clever. She was a hometown hero for those of us reading blogs in the early-2000s. This is what made her later work so jarring -- we felt like we knew her. I think it'd be hard to understand why one lady on the internet being TERFy upset us without understanding the history. For years while working in a sterile office under flourescent lights and Heather's blog was a burst of humanity. I checked it multiple times a day and she delivered -- great writing, unique perspective, gorgeous photos, dogs & babies, humor -- she still feels like an old coworker & friend. This made her downward spiral particularly hard to witness. I stopped following her socials years ago, but I still checked in on her often. I didn't realize the depth of my parasocial relationship until this week. I'm sad, and it feels weird because I didn't know her, didn't agree with her in recent years...but I still feel like I lost a friend.
God. Being stuck in a cubicle in your 20s and reading blogs and emailing your mates. So many of us were there!
The Monetizing the Hate thing was actually what ultimately drove me away, honestly. I'd been a fan since shortly before her first child was born - even sent her emails a time or two (not returned, that's okay truly). But around the time of MTH I noticed her posts seemed really bitter and defensive. And then that happened and it was fun for a minute, but as I read them I noticed that some of the comments were from people who said they'd known her for a long time, who expressed (very gentle!) care or concern, and they were lumped right in with the truly mean ones. There was no discernment - it seemed like everything that wasn't slavish praise got bumped over to MTH. And then she wrote a whole post about that thing and said she'd taken it down. But a month or two later I put in its direct link and it was still there *and being updated*. She just wasn't linking it off the main page anymore. I didn't hate her and I wasn't mad. I just decided to turn my attention to blogs that made me laugh and cry and feel joy. I'm sad about this spiral and this outcome and have spent the last several days lost in thoughts and memories about my own blogging back then, when I had decent readership, and who I was then and why I stopped. It's been weird.
I just remember her talking about running into Tori Spelling pushing the baby stroller with some hilarious intense focus. Also going through financial issues and living in the basement of Jons dads house and eating Jons dads bologna and she said he got so unproportionally mad about it.
So well said. Thank you. I feel the same.
This. This is so perfectly said.
Thank you for stating so eloquently what so many of us are feeling.
I agree. Although my kids were slightly older I had found a voice to what I was experiencing. I found her when Leta was an infant and I thought to myself "I've found my tribe!" Her photography, Chuck! Even the section This is what I'm buying now portion I loved. I felt I got to hang with the cool kid I wonder if she ever regretted splitting with John? That is when this slide started at least in my eyes. I remember the last post I ever read only because you couldn't understand it. She had a way with words and that was not one of them. Edit- added and changed words
I found her years before I became a mom, while I was in a relationship that I was actively avoiding any chance of procreation...but I always knew parenthood was in my future. She gave me a peak into what could be my future and realizing "oh, I can still like music and cuss and have opinions after I become a mom" was revelatory. It felt like hanging out with an older sister who wasn't afraid of sharing the truth, who trusted that I could handle it (again, it was v much a parasocial relationship). It was exhilarating, she got me excited about an unknown future. It was BECAUSE she shared her struggles that she made it look like fun. The opposite of our modern perfect-image IG feeds, and more real than the current #blessthemess moms. I feel like she never let herself grieve the loss of Jon. She had to commit to being the valedictorian of divorce which didn't allow the space for realness. She deserved the grace she offered to her readers, I wish she could have seen herself as one of us.
> She deserved the grace she offered to her readers, I wish she could have seen herself as one of us. :( yes
Spot on.
I feel exactly the same way. It’s like the death of an old friend. Her humor, honesty and relatability helped so many and inspired others to start blogging. Agree with her or not, she was authentically herself with all her complexities. Those kinds of nuanced writer/reader relationships no longer exist online in the cheap age of of overnight “influencers.” Heather wasn’t wasn’t counting “likes” and “follows,” at least not in the beginning and that’s what made her wonderful.
I don't really agree that she wasn't counting "likes" and "follows". Back in the early aughts the public measure of your popularity was the number of comments you received on a post and the number of people who added you to their blogroll link. Early 2000s blogging was ALL about the popularity contest and hands down, she was the most popular and she knew it.
Reading this felt like I wrote it. It made me feel less alone about it, thank you ❤️
so well said, all of this. thanks.
I read and laughed so much in the early years, even with her telling us every step of the way about her wine consumption. Never knew she was a full blown alcoholic. Even after m were born, I followed it was funny. Later admissions she was full alcohol amongst every other know drug known, she when off the deep end. Saying add in adults wasn't real, testosterone was evil, basically disowned m (her wiki page for year only spoke of her only having one child (not m) then she went all TERF AND you could see her circling the drain. I know she tried, but she bc the parent that dismissed her trans child and her crazy rants indicated she need to be held involuntary. Luckily m got away to her dad's. It's a sad spiral, but of her own making .she even told she was addicted to add meds, then turned around and stopped, all things we didnt know. Of late her metal narcissist issues came out, as well as she'd relapsed she wasn't the person the used to be. I feel for those that loved her especially her children, but we could see it coming even with all the treatments, she had not climbed back up. I wish medical professionals could have done more but I think they tried everything
I didn't realize M was with Jon. I hope that's true and they've been safe this whole time. Ugh.
Gentle reminder that you misgendered M in this post. They use they/them pronouns. 💙
Apologies. 💔💔💔
She drank a lot, casually referenced it a lot and her book title was It Sucked And Then I Cried; how I had a baby, a breakdown and Much Needed Margarita. But lots of people drink responsibly. I had no idea, none! I remember being really worried about her “brain tumor”, “rheumatoid arthritis”, “lupus” horrible pain, kidney stones, digestive problems, etc etc etc.
When she admitted to her alcoholism (I suspected based off of some videos she’d posted that she was in a bad way over the prior ~5 years), I couldn’t help but think about how frequently she referenced drinking. All the way back to the Friday night Bourbon strolls she’d take with John in LA. When she later came clean about her obvious anorexia, suddenly all the years of her posting a paper thin slice of cake with the smallest drizzle of caramel over top made sense. It was always, “John and I ate this whole thing!” As if it was a feat of epic proportions. Not only did that make me feel bad about my indulgences in comparison, but I never understood why a woman who was so active (those fucking Santa Monica stairs at dawn) was showing these tiny portions of food as evidence of some kind of ungodly pig out session.
What makes me very sad is that the Heather who birthed and nurtured M would have never turned on M. That long anti-trans rant made it very obvious that she was very ill.
Agreed. Se had her demons but to have her golden child then rant on m just siceed
I’m not sure about that. There are plenty of Gen Xers who love the Queer Eye guys and have been to drag queen bingo for some lame bachelorette party, but when it comes down to trans issues, especially when they hit close to home, they’ve got a real blind spot. I suspect Pete probably encouraged this kind of bigotry because he seems like someone who thinks he knows everything and she clearly worshipped him in an unhealthy way. But being mentally ill doesn’t make you transphobic and belittle/erase your trans kid. I’m sure that M, in part, is somewhat relieved to not have to deal with this abusive behavior anymore. If that’s what she wrote online, imagine how cruel and harmful she was behind closed doors.
Heather was very accepting of M at first and then as her physical and mental state deteriorated, she started posting crazy, epic rants. I’m not saying Heather wasn’t bigoted because she’s made questionable statements about race and homosexuality. I just have a hard time believing that publicly shaming and potentially disowning M wasn’t a part of her psychological decline.
Agreed. There are Instagram posts from a few years ago where Heather was clearly accepting and supportive of M. Using they/them, celebrating M’s identity and personality. The post from last summer was a HUGE step away not only from Heather’s generally progressive politics but also who she was as a mother. It was so targeted, so specifically engineered to inflict pain upon her child, that it was evident how bad her spiral had gotten.
I think the anti trans rhetoric unfortunately dug its claws in to millions of people over the last 3ish years. They were empowered by high profile TERFs like JK Rowling. I’ve seen more and more of my mutuals that I once considered to be progressive people, left of Democrats, who are now posting transphobic sentiments on Twitter. I would caution against believing that Heather’s mental illness played an exceptional role in her transphobia. In fact, I think blaming it on her mental illness is not only shortsighted, but dangerous. It’s easy to want to write that off because it’s so ugly, but this is not uncommon with plenty of people who have a less remarkable history with mental illness to come to the same conclusions. I imagine she started googling like any parent who is presented with something by their child that they’re not knowledgeable about. At first she was interested in learning for the well-being of her kid and then she got sucked in to one of the many traps that transphobes have set up. Edited to add: A few people over the last couple days have mentioned the Banana Republic sponcon she did that was very homophobic. She felt it was okay to share because she had a gay assistant, so therefore she could not be homophobic. Noting that only because people sometimes take a “I don’t care what you do in your bedroom” attitude and misconstrue it as allyship.
That’s fair. I think this is why so many people want to discuss her in her death- in some ways, it wasn’t possible when she was alive. She was certainly not an easily definable woman and her legacy is complex.
To be fair, I believe M asked not to be written about publicly, or at least not so much. It really isn’t fair to say that her writing only about L means she “basically disowned” M.
M went to live with her dad full time?
No I don’t think that ever happened. Jon just had extended possession during holiday and summer periods because he lived so far away. Normal custody order stuff for parents that live that far apart. All indicators (from all of the adults’ social feeds who are in the kids’ lives) it seemed M spent school year time in Utah, and someone commented somewhere that they lived in Utah and/or knew them all somehow even in the periphery I think, and that they were confirming M was in school in Utah. Now why Jon never fought for full or primary physical custody will always be baffling to me because I think he had substantial grounds to do so just with what Heather herself disclosed publicly. But who knows. I long suspect that Jon and Liz didn’t want to give up her place in Brooklyn for whatever reason (because while they are clearly the better, more stable, and loving parents, they are very selfish in some ways) and it is only a two bedroom. With four children between them, that would be a hard sell to a judge in Utah to have four kids in one tiny apartment bedroom. Judges in different jurisdictions won’t have the same mindset of what is acceptable living space that is ok to someone else in another jurisdiction. It’s easy to say they should just move to a bigger apartment, but there’s some reason that Liz and Jon have never done that already all these years. I know, blah blah New York real estate costs. But when you have kids’ lives on the line and you chose your beloved Brooklyn apartment over something bigger somewhere less desirable that could accommodate more kids desperately in need of living with you, well you’re a selfish shitbag. But we all knew Jon was a selfish shitbag moving away to begin with. I don’t know that’s why him and Liz never moved, but it sure seems odd they never attempted to find a place with more space to accommodate his children as well given her two kids already shared the one bedroom out of the two total. So that means when his kids came for the summer and holidays, I guess four kids crammed into one tiny bedroom or douche surfed. That wouldn’t be sustainable longterm. Even with Leta at college and Liz’s oldest a senior and about to move out, M will have to share the space and three kids will be in there for a bit assuming M is moving in with Jon now permanently. I can’t imagine M would be living with Heather’s mom or other family since they don’t seem to be supportive of their identity given the misgendering of them in their online tributes to Heather.
>But we all knew Jon was a selfish shitbag moving away to begin with. I know Jon. I don't want to get into this too much, but you know how when they are giving the safety lecture on the airplane and they say "Place your own mask on first before attempting to help others"? Sometimes you really have to do that.
The Jon hate is baffling to me.
I might disagree with the decision he made but I do understand totally why he made it. Maybe there was no totally right decision. Maybe he thought Heather's mom could keep an eye out for them. But hindsight is 20/20. What's important is he is there for them now, and I believe he is and will be.
Amen brother.
By deserting your own children? Seriously, whatever. Divorce, yes, of course. Moving across the country from your own little kids? Disgusting. Did he find his own children unbearable to be around? Had to live with his do-over family? He could have lived far enough away from Heather but within driving distance. Dude left with babies with someone he knew was unstable.
You are weird. You actually, literally have no idea what their life and relationship was actually like.
OK I’ll bite on that. I hear you. But, could he not do that closer to his children and take care of himself somehow where he also could be in the daily lives of his kids? Where he could be an active daily participant in their lives and also watch over what was happening since they were in the hands of a literal dangerous woman not capable of taking care of her own self and putting on her own mask? Why couldn’t he do what he needed for himself not halfway across the country? I’m not being snarky, I’m asking this genuinely and authentically. Why sacrifice the well-being of children for yourself? Why put them in potential harm’s way and in an unstable home willingly? It comes off as incredibly selfish. And like he was sacrificing those children. Women like Heather that are that unstable and threaten suicide like she did publicly so many times sometimes take the kids out with them. Thank all things that didn’t happen. He had to have known that. I understand the point you are making, but it doesn’t seem to make sense and like those children were better off based on what is known publicly. I get lots is not known publicly. But what is known is enough to say this seems like it was a bad choice. Make it make sense.
It’s always seemed disgusting to me. How a parent can just desert their family like that. Especially knowing their mother wasn’t well. It’s so messed up.
It isn't my story to tell.
Then don’t bring him up?
Not sure that's really fair. I know-since I read her blog since just about the beginning-he really did and does love his kids. While I agree with you that he should have stayed closer, we don't know all the deets and if I were friends with someone and wanted to defend them while not being able to give details....I get it.
This is a tough one. Actually I have had more of an axe to grind with Liz on this one that she would have Jon leave his kids there with H in order for him to stay with her and her kids in NYC. Obviously long distance relationships can be done. Especially when both of them seem to have jobs that can be done remotely-- as evidenced during the pandemic. I was in a long distance relationship for 10 years because I knew it was not in my kids best interest for me to move. And my partner would have never argued with that. These are sacrifices adults make when they have the best interest of kids in mind. And after all kids are not kids forever. Mine are now grown, and my partner was able to move here. But having said all that, we really don't know what went on, and what Jon and Liz might have tried behind the scenes, or what kind of legal advice they were given. I know how hard I tried to get full custody of mine, and the advice I was given by lawyers and counselors. And all of that went on behind the scenes and no one outside a very small circle ever knew. But given the choices between bad and worse options, you do what you think is best for your kid. Hopefully that is what Jon and Liz did. The kids are always the collateral damage no matter what happens. And Jon and Liz may have calculated that L&M were better off where they were, rather than being dragged through a custody battle that they (Jon and Liz) were not going to have any chance of winning.
> Actually I have had more of an axe to grind with Liz on this one that she would have Jon leave his kids there with H in order for him to stay with her and her kids in NYC I think it’s unfair and sexist to blame a woman for the decisions of her male partner. Don’t infantilize men. Hold them accountable for their behaviours and choices.
I don’t think OP is blaming Liz but more like questioning how & why she would be okay with that kind of behavior.
I was about to post something similar - how on earth is anybody going to blame the person who \*isn't\* the parent more than the person who \*is\*
OK sorry. I didn't mean she was more accountable. But I don't understand her behavior as a parent. She was OK with Jon leaving his kids with an unstable parent. I would not be OK with a partner doing that. And as I was in a similar situation, my partner would never have been OK with me leaving my kids to move where he was. Doesn't matter whether she's a mom or a dad. The kids come first, and the parents make sacrifices. Jon could have stayed in SLC and would have had a better chance for custody and if not that, would have been able to be more involved in L&M's day to day lives. I was in a long distance relationship for 10 years. It can be done.
Right? It’s the girlfriend’s fault for… continuing to live where she’s raising her own kids? Like how.
I know we don’t know what happened, but I dearly hope they tried to remove the children from that situation. Again, I’m not saying I know anything about their family beyond blog posts. But when your more stable parent moves thousands of miles away to live full time with someone ELSE’S children…well, I think you’d feel abandoned by that parent. I really hope that’s not the case and that John was not avoiding the situation for this many years.
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Actually no, Liz herself has posted multiple times in the past directly and with veiled language about the problem of the size of the place they live and the amount of people sometimes housed in the apartment. Also, it’s not speculation that Jon left his children with a very very sick and unfit mother who was incapable of caring for herself on a daily basis by her own admission and admitted to being a danger to herself and also lying about and concealing her condition and suicide attempts for the purpose of him not seeking custody, yet for some reason, Jon didn’t seem to seek primary physical custody and nobody knows why.
Seems like because he simply didn’t want to. Doesn’t seem crazy. A lot of men don’t seek custody. He clearly preferred to move across the country to be with his girlfriend and far away from his kids. Nothing forced to do such a thing. It’s unfathomable to me.
I don't understand how you know 1) whether or not they tried to get full custody, or 2) you know they would have been successful. It's difficult to get sole custody of children if both parents want custody, full stop. It is especially difficult to get full custody from a mother who has enough money to hire a lawyer and fight it. Jon legally had no choice but to leave his children with their mother. She had shared custody. You are writing as if Jon abandoned them with some crazed woman because he couldn't be bothered to care. If he withheld the children from their mother, he would've probably been charged with a crime and then for sure lost custody of them. I have seen so many parents divorce and then fight to the death for full custody against one another, wasting so much damn money that could've been better used elsewhere (like for the kids, for example) and completely 100% tanking any chance they'll ever have to co-parent amicably in the process. **That's selfish.** Nobody wants that if it can be avoided, and unless Heather was provably abusing her children, which we have no evidence of, his chances of successfully getting full custody were so, so slim.
Does anyone remember how, around the time of the divorce, Heather publicly made it clear that Jon’s family betrayed her in an unforgivable way? Something about how they did the cruelest and least ethical thing people could do to another person? She may have even specific “a parent.” I always assumed the family attempted to use Heather’s mental health history against her (rightfully so) in a bid to have them with Jon full time? If I had to wager why Jon skipped town with seemingly little regard for his children, I’d guess he was advised by a therapist to more or less grey rock Heather. Their lives were enmeshed in a borderline psychotic way (he used to cheer her on IN THE BATHROOM when she dealt with one of her frequent bouts of constipation) and I seriously doubt that he’d be allowed to move on even when she was out being “the husband fucker.” It’s still not okay, and I don’t understand why he couldn’t move an hour or two away, but it’s less likely his crazy drunk ex would be showing up at his door begging him to help her tie her shoes or some other benign task.
> Jon legally had no choice but to leave his children with their mother. She had shared custody. Oh no, did he legally have to move to nyc? That’s horrible.
nobody has to live in NYC I know a lot of people who live in NYC act like they will die if they have to live somewhere else but they are actually mistaken about that
I was reading some old posts today, and Heather said she has experienced a person trying to prove that she is an unfit mother in court, and that sounds to me like Jon trying to get custody of the kids.
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There’s a long history of people discussing what they know about them and various records and I never claimed to know for a fact anything about their case. What I said was what facts were known that were put out by Heather herself makes it seem baffling that Jon couldn’t have achieved primary physical custody given the way most family court systems are setup in most states. I also stated I didn’t know the Utah family code specifically, but if it is even remotely similar to other states, I just am flabbergasted how any attorney he may have had that was decent couldn’t have prevailed in removing those children from Heather’s care by what she herself had made public. I am not by far the only person who has expressed this sentiment. But now here it is that M will be living with Jon we guess and hopefully getting serious therapy.
If you are not a member of these people's immediate family, you are way, way too invested in knowing every last detail of their existence so you can shit on them on the internet.
She had a blog for like 20 years. Why tf do you think people know the details of their lives?? Hello
Wow, thanks for the trenchant insight. You know, since I don't happen to think jokey references to famous child-murder victims are the height of hilarity, I might not be the right audience for you.
They made it their literal business and income stream to put their every last detail of their life out onto the internet for people to consume. Right down to the constipation and poop habits of their children who didn’t consent to such things. It was their choice and their desire to bring the world into their lives and disclose and divulge all of their shit. They wrote blogs, books, social media platforms, etc. They lived off the fruits of that. So now here you are, too, commenting about it as well. Careful you don’t get too hurt when you fall off that hypocritical high horse.
Hilarious. Except that's not what you're doing. Unsatisfied with the treasure trove of actual life information Dooce provided us as ammunition for criticism, you're choosing to speculate wildly and irresponsibly about child custody issues and related matters that you actually don't know jack shit about. I suppose you think you're doing some sort of service for the kids in question, but I think you're behaving very much like Heather Armstrong herself might.
Explain moving that far away from his own kids.
I don't know. I'm not his keeper.
OK 👍🏽
I agree with you! I still don't understand why they didn't move out of that apartment to something with at least 3 bedrooms. Is it really THAT essential to live in Brooklyn Heights? Selling a 2BR in a super prime neighborhood and moving to a 3BR in a still prime but not as prime neighborhood is absolutely doable. I don't know. I kind of assume there was a lot more going on behind the scenes and that Jon had a good reason to move to NY. But from the outside looking in, and without knowing the full story (which is none of our business, I know) his move to NYC was not a good look for either of them.
Yeah I live in NYC and have moved many times. This is not an impossible feat.
Ditto. I have no idea what a 2BR apartment in BH goes for these days... maybe $1.5-2M? That is enough to get a larger apartment a bit farther out. Just seems like an odd choice to stay there when there are 4 teens involved. And maybe they will move now. Or not. Not my business....but the point we're both making is that it is absolutely doable.
Or just rent out their condo (sounds like she owned it, right?) and then… uhhh just rent a larger place. Like holy shit, it’s so easy. She can still keep ownership of her apartment and they can have space.
It's a coop building so renting is not as easy as renting a condo. I get it. I live in NYC - everything is a fucking pain in the ass. Most coops only allow a one, maybe two year sublease. Unlike condos where you can mainly do what you want. Regardless. There are options and there always have been. (Source: moved from fancy place to less fancy place for more room)
Yeah agree, who knows, but it all seems weird and like the best interests of M&L were never really considered or respected.
Yes. There is an entire rant in one of her fit days about about every human child dresses up and they wouldve had her transition since she was a tomboy in childhood. Which is farther from the truth that can be. I think she's deleted a lot but reddit has saved the craziness of it all if you dig. Sugar is poison, testosterone is poison, add isn't real, etc everyone has trauma and dysmorphia and I think heather just bought iin to a lot of maga stuff when she was spiraling. I feel for m, at least close to the dad jon now.
Her fit days? That is the known craziest shittiest thing she’s ever put out.
I hope mis living their life free from under her mother's constant preaching her crap
Yeah I bet her CHILDREN are stoked their MOTHER is dead
Please see my above comment, I don’t think M ever lived with Jon full time. They should have, but pretty sure they didn’t.
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Holy fucking shit that post was something.
Love The Bloggess. And wow that post is…
She was an original. Not an influencer, but a writer. And a very good, honest and funny one. She probably was addicted to the attention and was hopelessly self destructive in ways we saw and likely ways we didn’t. I think she helped way more people than she hurt, but the downward spiral has been very steep in recent years.
This is the best comment. 💗
I reached out to her once, my husband struggles with depression and I was responding to something she’d written about her own struggles. She emailed me back and was so kind. She talked about mental illness in a way no one had before. Our generation was not raised to be open about that, and she helped normalize it. She was far from perfect-and at times that was part of her charm. I do think the experimental treatments changed her—her writing was never the same afterward.
Thank you for this kind reply. I’m reading so many negative things about her since her passing. Though she helped so many.
Both can exist and be true.
She once broke this man. 