MARK HEMINGWAY ON THE DEATH OF HEATHER “DOOCE” ARMSTRONG: The ‘Queen Of Mommy Bloggers’ Left Us A Cautionary Tale About The Need For Community.

The thing is that I don’t think Armstrong wanted to end up divorced, and I have a feeling that if one could ask her if she would have traded the trappings of her public fame for a stable and happy family life, I think I know what the answer would be. Still, whether she wanted to get caught up in various cultural debates about the role of women in society, it’s hard not to place Armstrong on some kind of feminist continuum that celebrates the personal validation of women at the expense of their role in their families and communities.

In fact, the celebration of that rejection is kind of the point. On the far end of that continuum we see moral monsters such as Elizabeth Gilbert and Glennon Doyle who are both famous for writing celebrated, bestselling memoirs — Eat, Pray, Love and Untamed, respectively — that tell the story of them leaving their husbands and/or families to find their “authentic selves” or some such nonsense. In the case of Gilbert, it was the story of her dumping her husband, traveling around the world and having a series of shallow affairs with other men, and passing this off as a spiritual experience. Doyle’s book is about her leaving her husband, whom she had children with, to have a romantic relationship with soccer star Abby Wambach.

I hope it goes without saying that the idea of men receiving similar accolades for abandoning their families in search of personal fulfillment is laughable. I’m reminded of a joke from Jeffrey Frank’s satirical novel, The Columnist, where a philandering male politician writes a memoir entitled, Their Bodies, Myself. I don’t think that would have been a bestseller.

In any event, feminists have this in-joke: “Lord, grant me the confidence of a mediocre white male.” Well, speaking as a mediocre white male, believe me when I tell you I wish I had the cojones required to write a book about blowing up my family to pursue a new sexual relationship, package the story as a spiritual awakening empowering to women everywhere, and do it convincingly enough to become a pop culture phenomenon the way that Gilbert and Doyle did.

I think — and I’m being serious here, not snarky — we need to talk about the issue of mental health problems among well-off white women, and the large, and lucrative, culture that enables and sustains, and perhaps contributes to, them.