Popular Blogger Dooce Settles Lawsuit

Heather B. Armstrong, Better Known to the Cyber-universe as Dooce, is Done with Book Deal Gone Bad

Heather B. Armstrong, better known to the cyber-universe as Dooce, began her blog (Dooce.com) back in February 2001. As of September 2006, Federated Media Publishing reported that the uber-popular Dooce.com draws 2.4 million pageviews per month. 

Dooce’s large viewership must be warm comfort now for a woman who wrote that her site “chronicles her life from a time when I was single and making a lot of money as a web designer in Los Angeles, to when I was dating the man who would become my husband, to when I…lived life as an unemployed drunk…to when I threw up and became unbearably swollen during the pregnancy, to the birth, to the afermath, to the postparum depression that landed me in a mental hospital.” 

In fact, it was Dooce’s ultra-personal blog and insightful ramblings about her colleagues and life in delicious minute detail that got her fired in the first place. But perhaps it was her parent’s reaction to her online diary that caused the deepest hurt when Dooce’s older brother showed them Dooce’s postings. 

"They knew the way I was living but they were never confronted with it," Dooce told the Salt Lake Tribune about her computer illiterate parents. "It was sort of throwing it in their face." 

Dooce’s dad didn't speak to her for three months, her mother was crushed and Heather was ashamed. Eventually, all the shame of it fell away, Dooce said, adding, “you can't be insulated from what other people feel." 

With all the red-hot attention given to Dooce and her blog, a book by the honest writer seemed a logical next step. And in the Mediabistro article “From the Editors @ Kensington Books: Jeremie Ruby-Strauss” by Rachel Kramel Bussel, Kensington's Senior Editor Ruby-Strauss whetted readers appetite by inferring that Dooce would be writing a book for Kensington's Rebel Base Books line.