Life
Author of Dead Cat Bounce (2001), a novel about the world of Public Relations which secured a six-figure advance; also Peter and Mary have a Row (2002), a tale of young married in modern small-town Ireland.
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Works
Dead Cat Bounce (London; Flame 2001), 311pp.; Peter and Mary have a Row (London: Flame 2002), 325pp.; ‘Like a rock to water’ [an account of swimming lessons], in The Irish Times, Magazine, 20 April 2002 [infra].
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Commentary
Catherine Heaney, review of Damien Owens, Peter and Mary have a Row (Flame), 325pp., a ‘wry look at life in small town Ireland’; ‘undeniable flair for caricature’; ‘at times, the self-consciously funny tone [...] is in danger of becoming tendious, but ultimately this is an entertaining light read - well-written and possessed of enough bittersweet moments to save it from being just a succession of good one-liners.’ The book concerns the young couple of th title ‘trying to figure out how to weather their first marital blip’. (The Irish Times [Weekend], 16 March.
Eileen Battersby, ‘All that glisters is not gold’, in The Irish Times (29 Sept. 2001) [Weekend], writes of Damien Owens’s Dead Cat [sic & recte] Bounce: ‘as a novel, it reads like an extended stand-up routine that is never quite as funny as it seems to think’.
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Quotations
Swimming lesson: ‘Like a rock to water’, Irish Times Magazine (20 April 2002): ‘[...] Then there were the goggles. When I chose them, I was attracted by their promise of a “snug, comfortable fit” and “perfectly airtight seal”. In my excitement, I must have overlooked another small label warning that the elastic would snap and almost take your eye out the very first time you put the frigging things on.’
Notes
Dead Cat Bounce (2001), centres on Joe Flood, a PR who hates his work and lives in a bedsit in which you couldn’t bounce a cat, while his girlfriend has broken his best friends nose; his mother rings to say that unmarried sister is pregnant. Arminta Wallace warns against mistaking Damien Owens for the new Flann O’Brien: ‘a light novel full of whimsical observational humour about a Dublin lad’s life’. (The Irish Times [Weekend], 3 Nov. 2001; pb. notices.)