An Answer.

"What's your story about?"

I've been asked this a time or two.  In the daily grind of a coffee shop, in the dim of a wine bar with fingers crooked around the stem of a Bordeaux, in the wooden and red plush of a church sanctuary. 

"It's auuhhmm... a story... well, it's fiction... modern day... there's... a girl, and....she goes through some pain...well, it's not just about her, but... it's hard to explain without .... so much detail... "

"A romance?"

"God, no.  I hope I never write one."

The inquirer's politeness crumbles to dubious as I fumble around-- the 'wordsmith' at a complete loss for a grammatically correct sentence with a subject and verb to explain herself by.  Wince...

After too many of these unfortunate conversations, I still lack my one sentence small talk answer.

So as an exercise in my self defense, I began to think of some of my favorite stories and what their sentence summaries might be.

The Bible-- God redeems and triumphs.

The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene-- A whiskey priest in South America flees his persecutors by being sheltered from home to home, leaving a trail of martyrs behind only to be martyred in the end himself.

Murder Must Advertise, Dorothy Sayers-- Whodunit?

Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson-- Two orphaned girls live with their half crazy aunt in a 'sinking' house in northern Washington, and eventually burn their own house down.

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson-- A Congregationalist pastor writes his memoirs to his young son before his death.

The Dot and the Line, Norton Juster-- Boy Meets Girl-- or to be more precise, the dot meets the line.

Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh-- A wealthy nominal Roman Catholic family transitions from an older England to the new one.

Those are just a few book examples.  How about movies?

Amelie-- A painfully shy French girl finds her own creative way to 'give back' to the world.

Life is Beautiful-- a Jewish man fictionalizes the horror of concentration camp life for his young son in order to create survival for him.

Paris, Je T'Aime-- Paris, I love you!

Shawshank Redemption-- a man falsely accused of murder survives, thrives, and escapes prison after years of institutionalization.

Hitch-- cynical boy meets cynical girl.

This exercise afforded me the realization that any story 'essentialized' does not make the most interesting sentence in the English language.  Far from it.  The author must entice, seduce, surprise, convict, break down and, with the greatest hope-- renew the reader so that they are forever changed.  The one sentence only comes after time in the trenches with the author and her story.

Gloria in excelsis Deo.

Next time you ask, I hope that I'll have a better -- and much shorter -- answer.