Heather B. Armstrong is kinda like the Howard Stern of mommy bloggers. Visitors flock to her Web site, dooce.com, to see the former Mormon turn everyday life in Salt Lake City into an uproarious rant in which few topics are spared — and no one is left unscathed.
Her devoutly Mormon parents are frequent targets. As are Republicans. Potty humor is big too, whether it’s a pregnant Armstrong trying to empty her bladder in a cramped airplane bathroom or her daughter’s love of the word “poop.”
But mostly Armstrong invites the world to watch just how much life has changed for a Web site designer, live music lover and early-adapter-of-all-things-Web who is now a wife to the saintly Jon and stay-at-home mom to daughter Leta.
Armstrong has also used that evolution to cast a spotlight on her years-long bout with crippling depression and how medication made it all better. Her new book, “It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita,” chronicles her decision to stop taking drugs so that she could become pregnant and her struggles to adapt to motherhood as well as her subsequent descent into postpartum depression.
She held off returning to her prepregnancy medications because she wanted to continue breast-feeding her daughter — and did so, until the pangs of anxiety became so disturbing that she feared harming herself, or her family.
“I thought about suicide every day during those months. I thought about how I would do it; perhaps I would hang myself with the dog’s leash, or maybe I’d grab every single pill we had in the cabinet and drown them with a couple shots of tequila. I wanted to do something, anything to stop the pain,” she writes.
Ultimately Armstrong checks herself into a mental institution and credits it with saving her life, giving her time to focus on herself and allow a doctor to supervise the administration of a powerful drug cocktail that worked almost immediately.
In the book, like her blog, Armstrong is remarkably at ease with portraying herself in an unflattering light. Letting it all hang out on dooce.com led to Armstrong’s firing years ago — after she wrote some unflattering things about her workplace and her boss. But that dismissal — which pinged its way around the Web — only helped boost her following when she returned to blogging and never looked back.
She draws plenty of flak for her outspokenness, and she routinely bars comments on particular blog posts that she knows will bring out the crazies — the folks who harshly criticize her decision to blog so openly about her child, how she treats St. Jon and even how she chose to treat her own depression.
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