Dougherty’s Debut Highlights the Bonds Among Five Female Friends

Of her debut novel, Pittsburgh native Marianne Dougherty says it’s “about the power of female friendships to sustain us” — an accurate portrayal of what plays out over 380 brisk-reading pages. With a host of well-regarded freelance work in both local and national platforms, Dougherty has penned a tale about what bonds her strong feminine characters, who have nurtured and cared for each other over decades.

We’re introduced to free-spirited Alice Callahan, the beating heart of the novel, as she learns her teenage daughter Lily has been in a car crash. This incident set in 1986 gets the ball rolling and allows Dougherty to look toward both her characters’ past and present as readers follow the journey of heartache and growth for a cast of Alice’s close friends. This crew will be a familiar lot to many readers who can be assured that they’ll lean on each other during the tough times as they navigate motherhood, divorce and the struggles attendant to baby boomers coming of age during the Vietnam War.

And while the male characters are mostly written as flat and shallow, they’re useful for introducing conflict, as the quartet of women survive both life’s randomness and their own decisions, often made during a time when women had little agency. It’s an aspect that will allow many readers to gain much-needed perspective on a generation’s expected gender roles. But what’s most important may be the fact that these fast friends, brought together by simple neighborhood geography, go their own ways, becoming what they might have only imagined, before regrouping in support of one of their own. By the end, What We Remember allows its secrets to be revealed, the complicated lives of its cast proving the adage spoken by Alice’s mother: “Still waters run deep.”