Tell Me Again … An Interview With Jordan LaHaye Fontenot

Fontenot’s debut memoir Home of the Happy is a deep dive into the kidnapping and murder of her great-grandfather, a family story that stayed buried for 40 years.

Lafayette, Louisiana, resident and Managing Editor of Country Roads Magazine Jordan LaHaye Fontenot’s debut true crime memoir Home of the Happy: A Murder on the Cajun Prairie hit bookstores on April 1. She launched to a sold-out crowd at Cavalier House Books in Lafayette, visited Lemuria Books in Jackson, Mississippi, earlier this week and has more events scheduled throughout Louisiana through June 12.

We all know Southerners love family secrets, but not many people in their twenties have the guts to take years to investigate and write a book about their own skeletons in the closet. Growing up outside of Mamou, Fontenot had heard about her great-grandfather’s murder, but it seemed like something that had happened in the olden days. In college at Louisiana State University (LSU), she started writing about home for a class and her dad brought up the story. She said “tell me again” and really listened this time. She also learned that a man named John Brady Balfa—the nephew of famous Cajun musician Dewey Balfa—was serving a life sentence at Angola State Prison for the murder. And that her dad had doubts about Balfa’s motive.

She started looking into the case and one thing led to another. Now, eight years later, Home of the Happy is the result of her quest for the truth about what really happened to her great-grandfather Aubrey LaHaye. It’s part true crime, part memoir and part investigation. The good reviews and praise keep streaming in, along with the theories and memories of residents from Evangeline Parish. I sat down with Fontent at her home in Lafayette to talk about the book before it was published.

Erin Z. Bass: This is your first book, and you got a book deal with Harper Collins. Can you tell us about how you got an agent and then a publisher?

Jordan LaHaye Fontenot: I navigated all of that without a lot of knowledge, so I’m always glad to talk about it, because I think it’s a convoluted process that people don’t know a lot about. When I graduated from LSU in 2018, I had a rough book proposal ready. That was my honors thesis project. I knew that the next step was to submit to an agent, but I dragged my feet for years … Eventually, my dad was like ‘What are you waiting for?’ I saw a thing at the Tennessee Williams Festival, which was remote that year. So, I signed up for the panel, which is a bunch of different agents and one of them specialized in nonfiction, so it was perfect. You get five minutes, and they give you their opinion on it, and she had some advice, but at the end, she was like, ‘I’d love for you to email me and let’s talk more.’ It took months, I finally decided I would do it and within a couple hours, she said, ‘I would love to represent you,’ which is not how that process normally goes. I totally expected to do it for years. So, I’m just really grateful that things aligned.

EZB: What happened after that?

JLF: She started shopping, and we were on the market for like a month and a half or two months. We sold to Mariner [an imprint of Harper Collins], and it was a whirlwind. All of that happened really fast and I had sold it on proposal, so I only had a couple chapters written. They gave me a year to finish it … I turned it in in January of ’23, and it was way too long. The timing of that coincided with the Harper Collins strike, so the whole office was shut down for two months. Then, my editor let me know that she was leaving. They assigned me a new editor, and her name is Ivy Givens, and this could go badly for a lot of people, but it really turned out beautifully. Ivy’s from the south, and I think that we really connected on that. We started edits probably in December of ’23 and then had it ready for copy edits by May, which involved me chopping giant chunks of it out. I definitely think it’s a better book because of it.

EZB: I did want to ask you about the structure. It fluctuates between the past and the present, starting with with the kidnapping and the murder, because that’s very compelling. And then I feel like each chapter sort of functions like a short, short story. Is that intentional?

JLF: When I first started writing, that was sort of the way they were coming out, like short vignettes. The 10 days that they were looking for him [Aubrey LaHaye] at first was all back to back. So you would go through the 10 days, and then you would be pulled into my research. Actually, I had a lot less of me actively researching in the early drafts. It was about pace. It was like the pace was relatively high during the 10 days, but there were moments where it would get slow and then it was like I was asking the reader to go backwards and sit with me—and then there was the history. So, splitting it up into those like back and forth things was an idea that my editor kind of had, and we had to do this outline, which was crazy. That first part came together relatively quickly, but then to keep that rhythm through the whole book required a lot of shifting and changing and chopping things into chapters, but it felt right for the where we landed in the end.

EZB: Tell me about what you knew about the kidnapping and the murder beforehand. You say you had heard about it, but you didn’t know much. At what point did you become compelled to find out more?

JLF: Growing up, I don’t know exactly when I learned this story, but at some point someone told it to me, and I think it had to be my dad. It was just that my great-grandfather had been murdered and they found his body in a bayou [Bayou Nezpique], and that they had tied my great-grandmother to the bed. I knew that part of it, because I knew her. So that was something that stuck in my brain, and I’m pretty sure it was after she was gone. I don’t think that I knew this while she was still here. It definitely felt like something that had happened so, so long ago. So, I started writing about Cajun things and Acadiana and Evangeline Parish in college, and was talking to my dad about that, and he brought up this story, and it was the first time that I realized that there was someone still in jail. The repercussions were still very much happening and that made me think about my dad and realizing he was 18, and I was, like, probably 20 when I was having this conversation with him. That all kind of folded in and I just got really curious about it all.

EZB: Your great-grandfather was built up as a hero in Evangeline Parish and also in your family. You even have a chapter titled ‘The Greatest Man That Ever Was.” I was just thinking about how we romanticize our ancestors sometimes and don’t think about them as real people. How did your perception of him change?

JLF: The adoration was so overwhelming, and I was like this can’t possibly be the most accurate portrayal of this man. He had to be more complicated than that, and this happened to him, so there’s got to be secrets. I found some things about he and his father’s relationship to the Black community in Evangeline parish that wasn’t surprising. And when I found that news article of him at the segregation rally, I was like that’s not the kind of secrets I was hoping to find. That’s a very complicated history, and you have to be honest about it … I couldn’t find hard evidence of much else, but I was looking for it, and if someone came to me tomorrow and told me that they had something, I wouldn’t be shocked.

EZB: I have a similar question about your home. This book is an investigation, but it’s also a love letter to the place where you grew up. I’m sure you have some complicated feelings about that and I’m curious how you feel after seeing the bayou where this [murder] happened.

JLF: There’s a lot of romanticism about Cajuns and country land and the prairie and rural world of South Louisiana. And I think I’m kind of just looking at that in a more honest way. The bayou was interesting because I had a lot of wonderful memories there, and it meant something for me that was so different from what it meant to like my great-grandmother, who struggled and had experienced poverty beside it and then lost her husband in it.

EZB: I want to address the bombshell at the end of the book without giving too much away. What can you say about it?

JLF: I was almost done writing the book, and I really was going to end it just reflecting on the scenario. I was working on that, and that’s when I found, just by chance, the Angola archive … If I had gone to a library, it probably would have been available. It just didn’t really occur to me and they had just uploaded it all to JSTOR and it was searchable by name, which was brilliant. I just pulled up his name [John Brady Balfa] and read through the stuff. So, that was crazy, but, you know, like almost everything [I uncovered], it doesn’t mean anything, but it felt like something in a real way.

EZB: Did it sway you in one direction or the other?

JLF: At first it did, and then I started to overthink it all. Every possibility that could exist about why this exists. I still just don’t know.

Home of the Happy is one of our 2025 Spring Reading Picks. To learn more about the book and Fontenot, read this article in The Current.