The Building of a Woman
A Review of
Selfish: Unlearning, Reclaiming, and Telling the Truth: A Memoir
Kerry Docherty
Hardcover: Harmony, 2026
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Reviewed by Ann Byle
Readers familiar with the Faherty Brand of clothing and accessories will find the story of the launch of the brand fascinating, as well as anyone interested in the birth of a company. But Kerry Docherty, wife of co-founder Alex Faherty, goes beyond the business to reveal the arc of their marriage, starting the company, its early years, and her own growth in this honest, gritty memoir.
“I wasn’t always like this,” she says. “Selfish, that is. But when you’re born with a vagina, an unspoken thing happens. A chipping away begins, like a sculptor to clay, to ensure you fit in a certain mold…. And then one day you look down and realize you’re contorted into a shape that is entirely misaligned with who you are…. You literally cannot find your Self.”
While a story of the building of a brand, this is also the story of the building of a woman—an entrepreneur, wife, mother, daughter, and, finally, herself. Sometimes it’s not pretty, sometimes it’s not kind. Sometimes Docherty is brutally honest and she comes across as an imperfect woman—the kind of woman we like to hide behind a veneer of likability, smiles, and nice clothes.
Docherty, who is a lawyer by training, stepped into her role at Faherty as a brand manager, trade show person, and all-around organizer and eco-friendly proponent. It wasn’t easy starting the company and the strain showed in her marriage and mental/emotional health. Add two children as the years passed, and her Self threatened to disappear altogether.
Her journey to her Self is a hard fight, but she makes it decision by decision, fight by fight, inch by inch until, finally, she can be who she truly is. Yes, still a wife and mother and cofounder of Faherty, but now a whole person who is both flawed and perfect. The book offers no overt religious message, but Docherty’s search for Self is, ultimately, a search we all make.
“In all my reflections on the Self, I still cannot define it. Each of us is part Soul, eternal, perfect, and connected to the vast, all-encompassing universe; and part Human, temporary, physical, flawed, and uniquely individual,” she says. This book reveals all of those sides of one Self-ish woman.
Ann Byle
Ann Byle lives in West Michigan with her science teacher husband, Ray. Their young adult children are in and out regularly. Ann writes for Christianity Today and Publishers Weekly, among other publications, and is author of Chicken Scratch: Lessons on Living Creatively from a Flock of Hens.
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