Heather Armstrong of dooce.com fame releases new book at King's English

It's been three years since we last heard from Heather Armstrong, Utah's best-known "mommy blogger" gone big-time. In book form, that is.

Her 2008 book Things I Learned About My Dad: In Therapy collected for the first time in essays the wit, sarcasm and irony that made her Internet site dooce.com catch like wildfire. Ditto for It Sucked and Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita, her 2009 follow-up about the wild and crazy adventure known as parenthood.

Both were replete with laugh-out-loud one-liners, droll anecdotes about her conservative Mormon background, and sentence after sentence of prose seeping deep into the ground of a fertile honesty.

With Dear Daughter: The Best of the Dear Leta Letters, Armstrong gives us a follow-up along those same lines. This time, the title promises a more earnest take on the bloggers feelings about motherhood, America and apple pie. Collected from monthly accounts Armstrong wrote over the first five years of her daughter Leta's life, it also promises to catch an unexpected side of Armstrong's life, which has always veered dangerously close to celebrity ever since her dooce.com site started accepting banner ads in 2004, followed by Forbes' christening her one of the most "Influential Women in Media."

Countless fans of her courageous humor already have their calendars marked. As Armstrong herself might say in this case, as she did after the now legendary story of how she was fired from her job to launch a web site, "be ye not so stupid."

bfulton@sltrib.com

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Heather Armstrong "Dear Daughter" book release and signing

When • April 2, 7 p.m.

Where • The King's English Book shop, 1511 S. 1500 East, Salt Lake City

Info • Free. Call 801-484-9100 or visit www.kingsenglish.com for more information.