An Alabama Story
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An Alabama Story
The novel An Alabama Story is based on the accounts a southern man living in Alabama related to the author – he will here be referred to as Billy Bob. When Hammarberg came across Billy Bob, he was able to share in captivating tales of Billy Bob’s family life and how he and his family (here called the Hix) had interacted with their surrounding community. When Billy Bob let the author share in his tales, he made the author swear that he wouldn’t let anyone else hear about them. Yet the author decided that these tales were simply too remarkable for the world to be denied them. Hence An Alabama Story was written, a compilation of the tales Billy Bob had told the author about a year in the life of the Hix family. Hopefully Billy Bob will forgive Hammarberg for breaking his vow and publishing the book.
Billy Bob insisted that even though many of his tales simply required the suspension of disbelief, every single one of them were absolutely true. But since the author doesn’t want to jeopardize his good name by categorizing this work as non-fiction, in the case that some of them turn out not true, it sorts under Young-Adult Fiction.
Inside the covers of An Alabama Story, the reader will be treated to anecdotes like these from the Hix family life:
- The time the Hix burglarized a mansion as a family and brought home a hundred grand’s worth of loot
- The time Billy Bob and one of his sons chased all the blacks out of the Birmingham welfare office
- How Billy Bob managed to prevent his lesbian daughter from marrying a 50-year-old woman
- The story of when Billy Bob ran for mayor of Birmingham
- How two of the family members became local heroes in the pro-wrestling circus
During this year, the family ran into a number of celebrities as well, and these encounters are retold in full detail. Hopefully reading An Alabama Story will bring many hours of enjoyment, and perhaps even spark a debate about freedom of speech. Speaking of free speech – prior to the publication of An Alabama Story, certain well-known voices in American public life demanded that their commentary on the book would be included with its distribution. The author had no problems with including them, and their messages are listed below:
“Once again the white devil has put his racist sentiments on display for all of us to see. Peaceful activists such as myself are doing the best we can to let our nation heal the wounds it’s suffered under white supremacist rule, then this book comes along and ruins it all!”
/A. Sharpton
“This book will singlehandedly set us back at least 50 years in the struggle for women’s liberation. Not a single woman in this book has a career or works for a living; and even worse, the family’s lesbian daughter is constantly bullied throughout the whole book!”
/J. Fonda
“This is an outrage! In spite of a lifetime spent fighting for civil rights, I’m being scoffed and ridiculed in the pages of this book! Us blacks need to picket the Capitol over this!”
/J. Jackson
“I fear that after this book has been widely circulated, even more young queers than today will make that tragic step into the great beyond by taking their own lives, tormented by homophobia. Before you buy this book, think of the children!”
/D. Savage
“I feel that the language and the narrative elements of this book are very racially divisive and that they’re entirely inappropriate for 21st-century America. I’m especially appalled at the disrespectful references to me as a person and I urge you not to buy the book!”
/B.H. Obama