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.’
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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.)