Review: ‘Still No Word From You,’ a memoir that redefines the experience of reading romance
Noel Murray
“I’m sure you know the story of how the novel became the movie, based on the screenplay by William Wheeler and Robert L. May. It was the late 1950s, and I was a junior college English teacher. Our students are very talented, but I was hoping to find something different. So they read the book, they talked about it, they dissected it, they talked about it, they wrote their own books, but their reading of the book was not that interesting. They read it and they knew all it had to do was sit on the back burner of their minds, not to come up again. So I decided to try something different.”
The book is a memoir of a woman’s experience after reading a book for the first time. It is, in effect, a romance novel with a woman at its center. But the story is more complex than that, because the reader is as much a character of the novel as the woman.
When I first read Still No Word From You, I could see that it was not all that much different from the romance novels I read and gave my teenagers. The woman was the central character, the hero of the tale had no name, she was “the book.” She was “the girl on the train.” She was “the mysterious woman” who was “the woman in the room” who had a secret she just couldn’t figure out. She had no past, no life. She had only the life in her mind and the life in her heart. She couldn’t make up her mind whether to love someone or not. In fact, she couldn’t even decide whether she loved him at all. She couldn’t decide whether she wanted to have a romance with him or not. So she went with what she felt, and the truth in the story was what she felt, and what she wanted to believe.
Her name is Jane O’Rourke, and she is from a tiny town in Michigan, where she lives with her father and mother and brothers. Jane is born with a congenital heart condition, which means she will probably die young. The doctors say she will be fine if she lives to be forty-five. But Jane lives a