When Heather Armstrong – author of the wildly popular blog dooce wrote and published her book, It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita I knew I would be buying it.
No, I don’t have children.
No, I don’t plan on ever physically carrying any future children and therefore will never experience the “joys” of pregnancy and childbirth.
Yes, I bought the book and loved it.
Permit me to back-pedal and give a little history of my readership.
I’ve been an avid reader of dooce for just a shade under six years (Leta was still a baby, inching her way to toddlerhood). I quickly came to love the Armstrong family – Heather, her husband Jon, Chuck the dog and little Leta (confession: all posts featuring Leta are my favorite.)
Over the years I’ve felt joy, empathy, sorrow and overwhelming happiness for them as Heather shared their lives with the interwebs: From the announcement that she and Jon were able to quit the day jobs and live the dream of professional bloggers, to moving house (and moving again!), to losing loved ones, to critters in the walls and attics, to sickness and recovery and everything in between. I was there to read about the additions to the Blurbdoocery: Coco, the insane Australian Shepard, baby Marlo (Baby Rambo) and Tyrant (the much loved but greatly harried employee/friend).
There was once a question posed to the dooce.com community (which I’m terrible at keeping up with, but I love to venture to from time to time) about why childfree people read dooce.com anymore (Heather began the blog well before she was married with children in Utah.). It’s a question that still boggles my brain because Heather is not a standard “Mommy Blogger” and I don’t make a habit of reading blogs that fall strictly into that category for various reasons which are trivial to mention.
I read dooce – and I will continue to read dooce until the day the internet implodes and we’re all painting our faces and fighting the virus ala The Tribe – because the Armstrong’s are real people with real problems. With real emotions. With real challenges and real foibles and quirks. And a shit-ton of humor.
dooce is the the second blog I began to regularly follow and I am dedicated to the success of the Armstrong’s. I love when good shit happens to them simply for the fact that they are good, funny people.
There is nothing more to it than that.
OK, back to the book.
It Sucked and then I Cried chronicles Heather’s first pregnancy and subsequent battle with postpartum depression and eventual institutionalization which she was extraordinarily candid about with her audience on dooce.
Knowing Heather would come out on top eased the more painful passages on the horror of soul-crushing depression, boiling anger, sleepless nights and desperation of just trying to do what was always propagandized to be the most natural stage of a woman’s life. Heather’s humor is always just under the surface to help, though (herself as well as her readers, I imagine) and even though I’ve been caught on more than one occasion laughing out loud in public places as I read the book, my favorite parts were always the letters addressed to her daughter Leta, a habit Heather kept up fairly regularly for a good number of years on her blog.
This book is pure dooce – a guileless, individual tale of an American woman that speaks volumes of womanhood in general – as only Heather can tell it: with literary grace and a fart joke or two. Or twelve.
Aside: I really wanted to go to Book Soup to finally meet Heather and have her sign my copy but alas, that area of Sunset Blvd. is the devil to trek around on public transit.
