Jill Smokler, the founder of the popular parenting blog Scary Mommy and a New York Times bestselling author, died on Monday of brain cancer in her Baltimore home. She was 48.
Once described as “Baltimore’s biggest unknown celebrity,” Smokler, a Massachusetts native, founded Scary Mommy in 2008 as a way to share “the imperfect side of motherhood.” The blog took off, gaining millions of readers who saw themselves in Smokler’s candid descriptions of her journey as a parent — the good, the bad and the ugly.
Smokler authored two New York Times bestsellers, earning multiple Webby awards for her work and growing Scary Mommy into a national brand before selling it to a media company in 2015 and stepping away from the blog in 2018.
“In a million years, I would never have seen myself here,” she told the Sun in 2011. “Really, the fact that I can be doing something that I love and making a living off of it is kind of a dream. … It’s more than I ever imagined and I’m still kind of pinching myself.”
In an obituary released Monday by Smokler’s family, her loved ones wrote that she “lived as fully and unapologetically herself as anyone they had ever known.”
“She taught me that being authentic mattered more than being right,” her brother, Matt Epstein, said in the obituary.
Smokler died of glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer that she had battled for more than two years, according to her obituary.
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