A Prayer for Owen Meany is full of homages to other novels. What if he didn’t grow? I was thinking.” Irving would later incorporate the memory of passing Russell over the heads of kids in Sunday School into a scene in Owen Meany. ‘Johnny,’ one of them said, ‘I presume he grew.’ That night I lay awake in bed, pondering the ‘What if.’ that is the beginning of every novel for me. ‘But he was too small to go to Vietnam!’ My friends looked at me with pity and concern. “I said one of the stupidest things I’ve ever said. Russell had moved away before they had become teenagers, and had been killed in Vietnam. “Then another one of my friends reminded me that, in Sunday School, we used to lift up this little boy he was our age, about eight or nine, but he was so tiny that we could pass him back and forth over our heads.” “Suddenly one of my friends mentioned a name that drew a blank with me-a Russell somebody,” Irving wrote. The author was home in Exeter, New Hampshire, for Christmas in the early ‘80s, where he and his childhood friends were discussing other friends who had gone to Vietnam and never come back, or who had come back but were messed up from the experience. John Irving based Owen Meany on a childhood friend. “What makes the first sentence of A Prayer for Owen Meany such a good one is that the whole novel is contained in it.” 2.
“I may one day write a better first sentence to a novel than that of A Prayer for Owen Meany, but I doubt it," Irving wrote. In the case of Owen Meany, Irving didn't write the first sentence (“I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice-not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God I am a Christian because of Owen Meany”) until at least a year later. “If I haven’t already written the ending-and I mean more than a rough draft-I can’t write the first sentence.” “I never write the first sentence until I know all the important things that happen in the story, especially-and I mean exactly-what happens at the end of the novel,” he wrote after the book was published. Irving always writes the ends of his novels first, and Owen Meany was no different: He wrote the penultimate paragraph of the novel first, and added the last paragraph two days later. The first sentence of A Prayer for Owen Meany is John Irving’s favorite.
Here are a few things you might not have known about it. Author John Irving’s novel about a boy with a “wrecked voice” who believes he’s an instrument of God is a staple on high school summer reading lists.
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