The personification of just what is possible on the Internet is sitting at a deli in the Avenues. She's just back from the White House. You never know when Oprah's going to call again. In the Forbes rankings, she's No. 7 on the "web celebrity" list. She has 1.6 million followers on Twitter. Every day, 55,000 people read her blog.
It's amazing how popular you can become these days in the privacy of your own home.
"I'm as blown away as anybody by this," says Heather Armstrong as she stirs her drink.
Writing a personal column — that's what she does — is nothing new in America. It's as old as Ben Franklin, as revered as Will Rogers. But no one's ever delivered quite like Heather, whose personal views and wry observations are routinely read by millions and she is yet to kill a single tree, let alone a rain forest. Nothing she's written in the almost 10 years since she started her blog, Dooce.com, has been produced on paper.
And the audience just keeps growing. She had quite a following when she was writing about being single in L.A. Then she got married and pregnant and attracted even more readers. By the time she had her first daughter, Leta, and suffered severe postpartum depression, and wrote about it, she had more followers, sympathizers — and not insignificantly, more advertisers — rush to her site than ever before.
For today's interview, she has driven down from the new home on Salt Lake's east bench that she and her husband, Jon, recently moved into, with Leta and her new little sister, Marlo.
"I like to call it the house postpartum depression built," says Heather.
In person, she's her blog — witty, frank, always on the verge of saying something clever about everyday things you're pretty sure no one's ever said before (like Bill Cosby once did, or Ben Franklin).
"I write in a way a lot of people wouldn't know how to write, or couldn't because they wouldn't dare," she says. "The writing (comes) from my mom and the humor's from my dad. My mom is just this amazing capable woman and my dad is the funniest man I know."
High praise for people who have taken their fair share of hits in a family blog that isn't exactly out of the Family Home Evening manual; one of the first things Heather wrote about when she started Dooce.com, to her parents' dismay, was her disaffection with the LDS faith in which she was raised.
And what she's written about her education at BYU, where she was an English major, well, let's just say it could easily get her a dues-paid membership in the University of Utah's Crimson Club, for life.
But families are forever, or at the very least they're capable of outlasting an outspoken blog entry or two. Both Heather's mom and dad now live in Salt Lake (Heather was raised in Memphis), and when they're not spoiling their grandkids, they're Dooce.com's most avid readers.
"Grandparents are put on Earth to ruin the kids," says Heather, who does admit that, at 34, she's more reined in than she was at 24.
"When I started my website I didn't think 12 people would read it," she says. "I was really on the edge, really, really raw. I have since come to a better idea of what I could and couldn't talk about."
Whatever she's decided, it's worked. She's won virtually every weblog award there is — best blog, funniest blog, best-designed blog, best-written blog; in 2008, she won a lifetime achievement award from the Weblog Awards — at 32. She's been featured on the TV news shows, in major newspapers from coast to coast, and she's sat down on the set with Oprah — one female phenom talking to another.
In April the White House called and asked her to participate in a forum on workplace flexibility — another direct result from her postpartum blogs. (She also discussed the postpartum experience in the book she wrote last year for Simon & Schuster, "It Sucked and Then I Cried," which merely made it to No. 16 on the New York Times Bestseller List.) Members of the Obama staff are among her daily readers. When she arrived at the Washington forum, they put her on the front row, close enough to reach out and touch Michelle Obama.
The experience was just another result of sitting at home, writing about your life and hitting the "send" button.
"I know. It's insane," says Heather, as she excuses herself, hops in the hybrid and heads back to the house postpartum depression built. Because that's where the good stories are.
Lee Benson's column runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com.