© Olivia Luz Perillo

A recipient of Louisiana State University’s 2018 Sarah Sue Goldsmith Award for Nonfiction, Jordan LaHaye Fontenot’s work has appeared in Oxford American, Atlas Obscura, and others. Her work has been published most extensively in the Louisiana arts and culture magazine, Country Roads, which she has overseen as editor since 2018.

Schedule

10:00 am to 11:00 am
Bienville Building, Conference Center 118
The Past Isn’t Dead: Memoirs at the Crossroads of Violence and Voice
Jordan LaHaye Fontenot, Home of the Happy: A Murder on the Cajun Prairie
Bernice L. McFadden, Firstborn Girls: A Memoir
Lauren Rhoades, Split the Baby: A Memoir in Pieces
with moderator Teresa Tumminello Brader

11:15 am to Noon
Cavalier House Books Tent
Book Signing

Home of the Happy: A Murder on the Cajun Prairie

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

"Riveting and atmospheric, Home of the Happy is also a heartfelt grappling with a trauma in the author’s family and her attempts to unravel its secrets once and for all. LaHaye Fontenot’s writing is urgent, fueled not just by a desire for justice but by love for her ancestors and the Cajun community of south Louisiana. A must-read for true crime and mystery fans."— Ana Reyes, New York Times bestselling author of The House in the Pines

On January 16, 1983, Aubrey LaHaye’s body was found floating in the Bayou Nezpique. His kidnapping ten days before sparked “the biggest manhunt in the history of Evangeline Parish.” But his descendants would hear the story as lore, in whispers of the dreadful day the FBI landed a helicopter in the family’s front lawn and set out on horseback to search for the seventy-year-old banker.

Decades later, Aubrey’s great-granddaughter Jordan LaHaye Fontenot asked her father, the parish urologist, to tell the full story. He revealed that to this day, every few months, one of his patients will bring up his grandfather’s murder, and the man accused of killing him, John Brady Balfa, who remains at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola serving a life sentence. They’ll say, in so many words: “Dr. Marcel, I really don’t think that Balfa boy killed your granddaddy.” 

For readers of Maggie Nelson’s The Red Parts and Emma Copley Eisenberg's The Third Rainbow Girl, Home of the Happy unravels the layers of suffering borne of this brutal crime—and investigates the mysteries that linger beneath generations of silence. Is it possible that an innocent man languishes in prison, still, wrongly convicted of murdering the author’s great-grandfather?