‘Scary Mommy’ Founder Jill Smokler Faces Glioblastoma Diagnosis With Her Trademark Wit and Aplomb

This is not Jill Smokler’s obituary.

Yes, the witty founder of Scary Mommy was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive, incurable form of brain cancer, last April. In the past year, she has undergone countless scans, three surgeries, radiation, chemotherapy—which led her to cut her iconic curls—and is heading to Germany this summer to participate in a Hail Mary trial.

“Glioblastoma was not on my 2024 bingo card, alas, here we are. Life changes fast, friends,” Smokler posted on Threads May 3, 2024, outing her diagnosis. “Not saying it’s worth it, but a dire cancer diagnosis is one way to feel loved, and that part is pretty damn nice,” she wrote 12 days later. And: “My gyn keeps trying to book my annual and I’m like, what’s the point. And sunscreen? Done with that.”

That Smokler, 48, is being so frank and funny about her diagnosis isn’t a surprise to those who have been following her since her early blog days. Her brand has always been radical honesty. Her diagnosis has not transformed her into someone who has a renewed appreciation for life. She’s not smelling flowers or running through meadows. She’s still the same old Scary Mommy, maybe just more scared than scary these days.

“I really only talk about it on Threads,” says Smokler. “People sharing their success stories is encouraging to read, and then people just sort of sulking and commiserating is also comforting.”

In November she posted to cancerthreads: “Where are the snarky, dark people who are sick? I need some REAL folks to follow. Sick of optimism and God talk.” More than 65 comments came in.

She explains: “Look, I’m not grateful for this or thanking God I’ve had this experience. I can’t relate to people who feel like that. I don’t know if they were positive before or if this just changes their perspective, but I was not positive before. This has not brought out positivity.”

Smokler—yes, she knows everyone still refers to her as Scary Mommy—started her online blog in 2008, when she had three kids under the age of four. Her posts about motherhood were raw and authentic and mothers everywhere felt seen.

At the height of her popularity, Smokler was speaking at blogging conferences, writing New York Times best-selling books, appearing on talk shows, and establishing the Scary Mommy Thanksgiving Project, which raised money for families who couldn’t afford a Thanksgiving dinner. She won three Webby Awards and was the go-to voice of the imperfect mom.

After seven years, Smokler sold Scary Mommy—which was then averaging about 10 million monthly readers—to a company called Some Spider Studios. She became chief content officer and led a team of video producers and writers to provide parenting advice and tips with an acerbic edge to an audience north of 100 million, according to Forbes magazine. But for Smokler, it just didn’t feel like her brand anymore and she stepped down in 2018. (Scary Mommy is now owned by Bustle Digital Group.)

Other things she’s been open about: Smokler and her husband, Jeff, separated in 2017 after he first revealed to her, then to their kids, and finally in a Scary Mommy post, that he was gay. (They had a rough patch for a while co-parenting, but Smokler’s diagnosis has brought them closer together.) She’s also been open about her bipolar diagnosis in 2018.

That she’s been facing her grim cancer diagnosis with humor, honesty, and forward-facing wit is a surprise to no one.

SHE’S NOT SMELLING FLOWERS OR RUNNING THROUGH MEADOWS. SHE’S STILL THE SAME OLD SCARY MOMMY, MAYBE JUST MORE SCARED THAN SCARY THESE DAYS.

It’s February, a few days before Valentine’s Day, and Smokler is sitting on the couch in her beautiful sun-drenched midcentury rambler in Pikesville. Leo, her Australian labradoodle, is thrilled a playmate has arrived. Smokler doesn’t look sick—but there are signs. Her enviably thick mass of locks is now a pixie cut and she’s wearing glasses.

“My hair was such a huge part of my identity,” she says. She posted a picture of her hand holding a big clump of hair last June and commented, “It’s just hair. It’s just hair. It’s just hair.” She finally cut it last December. “I wish I had done it sooner,” she admits.

The glasses came about after a week-long hospitalization over the winter with the flu. “Everything was blurry. And my neurologist said, if it were tumor related, it would be my peripheral vision. It wouldn’t be my everywhere vision,” she says. It remains a mystery. “The vision has been harder to deal with than the hair.”

That aside, “I’m feeling pretty good at the moment,” she says. “I finished up my chemo last week, so I’m on a break and not currently puking all the time.” She even started driving short distances by herself again, but exhaustion is a constant. “I’m so tired I can’t get through the day without taking a three-hour nap,” she admits.

A good portion of her day is spent dealing with her innumerable medications, which her best friend, Julie Bender, helps her keep track of with pill organizers and a giant whiteboard checklist in her kitchen. “I’m very frustrating, because I just want to do everything myself. And be like, ‘Back off everybody—I got it under control.’ And then Julie comes over, and she’s like, ‘You didn’t take your pills Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. What was up with that? You had a whiteboard!’”

Smokler lives in a constant state of brain fog—rewashing clean clothes, leaving the dog in the backyard for hours, and, yes, sometimes forgetting to take her medication—and it’s frustrating for someone who once led a multimillion-dollar empire.

It came seemingly out of the blue. One minute she was living life as an attractive middle-aged single woman producing her podcast, She’s Got Issues, and dealing with dating and moody teenagers, and the next she was waking up at The Johns Hopkins Hospital in the ICU.

She can’t recall one single thing about that week. She only knows what her family has told her. Her youngest son, Evan, was at her ex-husband’s house and called to say hi. He thought she sounded strange, came over to check on her, and immediately called 911.

It turns out she’d had a seizure. Smokler was rushed to Sinai Hospital, where she fell into a coma, and was then transferred to Johns Hopkins, where she remained unconscious for several days. When she woke up, Smokler not only thought it was 2004 but didn’t recognize Evan or her brother.

“I am definitely grateful that I don’t remember the looks on their faces when I didn’t recognize them,” she told today.com. “That must have been gutting.” (Yes, her cancer was national news.)

A neurologist told her she had a brain tumor and would need immediate surgery to get it removed. “At the time, I wasn’t like, ‘Oh, a brain tumor means cancer.’” Instead, in her Smokler way, she thought, “That’s so dramatic, Jill. Like, of course you get a fucking brain tumor. Why do you have to be so over-the-top, couldn’t you get breast cancer?”

About 10 days after her operation, Smokler, along with her mom, Kathy Epstein, who had moved into Smokler’s house to help care for her, and Bender returned to see the surgeon.

“I’m not a researcher at all,” says Smokler. “My mom, she’s very research-based, and Julie is, too. And I’m just sort of like la-di-da, I’ll get the information when I get it.”

Smokler was also still recovering from brain surgery, plus there was also a bit of magical thinking and understandable denial. So, she was the only one not pondering the worst-case scenario when they walked into that office.

IN AN INSTANT, HER LIFE STOPPED, CHANGED, PIVOTED. HER FUTURE PLANS WERE SUDDENLY GONE.

According to the Glioblastoma Foundation, glioblastoma is an aggressive stage 4 brain cancer, with limited treatments and a median survival rate of one year after diagnosis. Only five percent of patients survive five years after diagnosis.

In an instant, her life stopped, changed, pivoted. Her future plans—seeing her children grow up, a business rebrand, a new life partner—were suddenly gone. What did the word future even mean?

In the days and weeks that followed, she was pragmatic. “Immediately after, I was just sort of, I don’t know, you hear a [life] expectancy like that,” her voice trails off. “I just sort of felt like, alright, well, this is it, this is over, and I really started mapping out what I wanted my funeral to be like, did I want to be cremated?”

Googling water cremation, where a body is dissolved in a solution of water and alkaline chemicals, was better than thinking about how terrible radiation made her feel. And she turned to a form of gallows humor.

“I was also kind of relieved that I could stop stressing about long-term planning, because that’s always looming over my head. So that’s liberating,” she says. “I think maybe it was easier to do that than get really emotional, which I certainly have since then.”

After the post where she announced her diagnosis, Smokler was surprised and touched by the amount of support—some of it a little too much.

“To have people from junior high reaching out who all of a sudden want to see me—like, I haven’t thought about you since I was 11 or 12? Okay, I don’t really have any interest in my dying days to resurrect [a friendship],” she says in that same brutally honest way that made her famous.

“I think Threads reminds Jill of her early days of blogging,” says Bender, who met Smokler in 2013. In other words, she can share things online to  housands of followers that might be hard to say to a close friend.

“It’s refreshing to hear someone say, ‘I don’t feel like smiling today. This sucks. And I’m too young.’ Her intentions are always so pure and genuine,” says Bender. “And that’s what resonates with people.”

Scroll through the responses to her posts to see the proof is in the pudding.

“Jill, you don’t need to hear my glio story,” @erikaw22 commented on one of Smokler’s entries. “I just want you to know that more people than you will ever know have been positively impacted by your work. You have gotten me thru so many of the ‘mom things,’ I can’t begin to explain. You helped me feel less alone when I was so very alone. I hope the love we are all sending you now and in the future remind you that you are not alone either—sending u all of the love and strength u have given all of us, and then some!”

And Smokler needs it now more than ever. Her most recent MRI was troubling.

“Well, my MRI didn’t come back with the result I was hoping for. They told me to expect a roller coaster when I was diagnosed but this low was unexpected and a punch in the gut. FUCK THIS FUCKING DISEASE,” she posted in April.

“There’s a mass that needs to come out and I’ll need surgery this month,” she says on the phone in early May. A few minutes later, she’s talking about her new podcast It Is What It Is And It’s Not Great.

“I just recorded my first episode,” she says. “I’m in such a weird place—imminent death but trying to plan if I have five, six, seven years. But I’m certainly as negative and snarky as ever,” she says, laughing.

Everyone was worried that after her surgeries, she’d wake up a different person. “But I’m still mean.”

She’s joking, of course, but like anyone else, is learning to navigate the unknown.

“In the beginning, I got so dark, [feeling like] I’m dying any second,” she recalls. “Now I’m living, planning for a couple months from now, a year from now, but I don’t want to plan too long-term.”

She’s hoping the surgery and the trial in Germany will buy her some more time—especially with her kids Lily, 21, Ben, 19, and Evan, 17.

“I spent so much time when they were pre-teens and teenagers longing for the little days again,” she says. “I just really wanted to go back in time, and now thank God they are the ages they are, because my biggest fear when I couldn’t really see a future was that they wouldn’t remember me, they wouldn’t know me, that I would be the dead mother in the background. But now I feel like they really get me.”

Smokler’s daughter is majoring in advertising and viewership, and she can draw a neat line from her own career to that.

“I love seeing that,” she says. “I feel like the kids are—knock on wood—in decent places where I don’t think I would have felt like that five years ago and 10 years ago, which would have been so devastating.”

She’s also been trying to record messages for her kids’ biggest milestones, but it’s brutal. “Hi Lily. Happy wedding day, from beyond the grave,” she intones before getting quiet.

Mostly, she’s living in the moment, as best she can. “I think I just need to focus on the now—which is so hard. I don’t know how people do that.”

There’s relief she can concentrate on the new podcast—a farewell of sorts. A place to air her grievances, fears, and that trademark candor. She has guests lined up and has shelled out money for a studio and an editor.

“I talk about this a little bit on the first episode, but I had an aunt I was very close with,” she says. “She died several years ago and did not leave me anything—not a letter or a conversation. I felt so irrelevant. I don’t want my people to feel like that.”

For Smokler, that means everything from writing heartfelt letters to her loved ones to making sure that a friend who loves her dining-room chairs receives them after her death: “It would make me so happy to think about those living on at her house.”

She wants to leave behind things that make the people in her orbit feel seen and loved.

“I don’t know if that’s my legacy,” she says. “But somehow I’m going to be here even when I’m not.”