A Prayer for Owen Meany

by John Irving

Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!

Owen Meany, who rarely wasted words and who had the conversation-stopping habit of dropping remarks like coins into a deep pool of water … remarks that sank, like truth, to the bottom of the pool where they would remain, untouchable … Owen said to me once, “YOUR MOTHER IS SO SEXY, I KEEP FORGETTING SHE’S ANYBODY’S MOTHER.”