Julie Yip-Williams, whose candid blog about having Stage IV colon cancer also described a life of struggles that began with being born blind in Vietnam and her ethnic Chinese family’s escape in a rickety fishing boat, died on Monday at her home in Brooklyn. She was 42.

Joshua Williams, her husband, said the cause was metastatic colon cancer.

Ms. Yip-Williams’s richly detailed blog, which she started writing after receiving her diagnosis in 2013, was more than an account of her siege with cancer. It was also a meditation on love and family as well as a message of openness to her young daughters, Mia and Isabelle, about her illness.

Ms. Yip-Williams wrestled with hope, which she cursed as an “illusory sentiment.”

“Cancer crushes hope, leaving a wasteland of grief, depression, despair and a sense of unending futility,” she wrote in 2014, adding: “Hope is a funny thing, though. It seems to have a life and will of its own that I cannot control through the sheer force of my mind. It is irrepressible, its very existence inextricably tied to our very spirit, its flame, no matter how weak, not extinguishable.”

Her blog, with additional material written by Ms. Yip-Williams, is being turned into a memoir by Random House, which expects to publish it later this year or early next year.