Word to the Mothers

You consider your weekly dose of Us Weekly and InTouch a great real-life reality check – who doesn’t feel better after reading Worst Bikini Bodies and Stars Without Makeup?

But you know those Baby Bump Joy stories –  and their sequels, Bikini Body 5 Weeks After Baby –  are as unreliable as Brangelina breakup rumors.

For the real gossip on motherhood, you’ve gotta go to the ‘net. Blogger Heather Armstrong, author of the hugely popular personal blog Dooce, tells all in her new book “It Sucked And Then I Cried: How I Had a Baby, a Breakdown, and a Much Needed Margarita.”

Armstrong was one of the first to keep a personal blog, and her site took off in 2002, after she was fired from her Los Angeles web design job when her bosses discovered her posts about hating her job and co-workers. For a time, others who suffered the same fate were said to have been “dooced.”

Despite the professional setback, Armstrong continued to blog even as she got married, moved to Salt Lake City and got pregnant. Along the way, Dooce became a sort of first-person tabloid coverage of her life. No topic off limits, she wrote about the good, the bad and the ugly, including a deep descent into postpartum depression that landed her in a mental hospital for a week.

“It Sucked,”  chronicles Armstrong's journey, from the time she started trying to get pregnant to her daughter's nine-month birthday. Written in the same frank, no-holds-barred style as her blog, Armstrong's knack for finding humor in bad days and frustrations, and putting words to the most tender feelings between a mother and her newborn shines through. Her intimate, touching, hilarious story has all the juiciness of good gossip, with all the heart of a real mother.

Now that’s a mama drama you can relate to.

Available at local bookstores or online at  amazon.com