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New York Times best-selling author and founder of the popular Scary Mommy blog Jill Smokler died Monday of brain cancer.
Smokler, a mom of three, was 48. She made a name for herself with unflinching honesty about the realities of marriage and parenting, and developed one of the biggest parenting blogs as the genre was emerging nearly 20 years ago.
Smokler shared that she was diagnosed with glioblastoma in May 2024.
This type of brain cancer is the most common and most aggressive type of brain cancer in adults.
“It’s been described to me as an octopus with tentacles,” Smokler told Today. “It’s not a one-time thing. It keeps coming back.”
Glioblastoma develops star-shaped cells that stretch legs into the brain and spinal cord, making them hard to remove.
Smokler spoke openly about her cancer journey, posting about hair loss and completing radiation treatment.
While there are treatments available, like radiation and chemotherapy, the disease is considered incurable. The cancer infiltrates healthy tissue, making surgical removal impossible.
Only two weeks after Smokler’s diagnosis, she was told her cancer reached Stage 4, meaning the cancer has spread to other parts of her body.
As expected, she approached it all with candor and comedy. “I decided I was done with sunscreen and contemplated starting to smoke cigarettes for the first time in my life,” she wrote on her blog. “I had a memorial playlist lined up and discovered that water cremation sounds a hell of a lot less terrifying than the notion of going up in flames.”
Not one to sugarcoat, Smokler told Today that after her diagnosis, she wasn’t feeling great: “I keep alternating between feeling so profoundly sad and so pissed off.”
People with glioblastoma have a median life expectancy of 12 to 18 months. Only 5%-7% survive five years after diagnosis.
Symptoms depend on where the tumor forms in the brain, but can change thinking, speech, vision or balance.
“All I want to do is spend time with my kids, ideally on a beach because that’s my happy place,” Smokler said after her diagnosis. “It’s so ridiculously bittersweet — I am trying to focus on the sweet part.”
Smokler started Scary Mommy as a stay-at-home mom in 2008. Her approach of humor, honesty and self-deprecation were instant draws for her readers.
“She said the things we weren’t supposed to say out loud, and because she said them first, millions of women finally felt allowed to say them too,” the site wrote after her death.
Smokler said she was most proud of “The Thanksgiving Project,” a fund-raiser for families who couldn’t afford turkey dinners. It was inspired by a comment on Scary Mommy from someone who confessed to feeling humiliated they couldn’t feed their family.
Smokler helmed Scary Mommy until 2015, when it was sold to Some Spider, LLC. It averaged 10 million readers at the time. Now, the publication is owned by Bustle Digital Group.
“She gave millions of women permission to stop pretending and feel a little less alone. She was funny, fearless, generous and entirely herself,” her family wrote in a statement. “More than anything she built, Jill was proudest of her three children, Lily, Ben and Evan. We are heartbroken to lose her, and endlessly proud of the mark she left on the world.”
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