Louise was born in New Zealand and grew up in New York City from age 12, working summers from age 15 to 21 as a news reporter. She attended the UN International School, then Columbia College, New York, graduating in three years with Columbia’s first co-ed class. Throughout college, she worked at TIME Magazine. She is fluent in French and a lifelong enthusiast of German. Much of her life and work is devoted to the search for the treasure that gleams in the dark – treasure that is often just out of reach (Maeterlinck).

Louise left TIME and brief positions at Christie's, The Associated Press, and the New York Stock Exchange at age 22 to explore the south by car. She lived in Oxford, Mississippi for a year, clerking in the emergency room and at Square Books. She spent a summer in a Connecticut hospital and took a job at a local magazine, becoming a travel writer based in the U.S, with journeys in the Caribbean, Europe and the Aegean. At 28, she left the magazine to focus on her own writing. 

Her novels, poems and essays address a woman's struggles to be free in a priapic often narcissistic society. She embodies, says Amanda Fortini in a an essay in the LARB, a woman alone, “itinerant, deracinated, distant from family, and making it up as she goes." Her characters are often marginalized, struggling for stability, love and a sense of home. 

She has won awards including best critical and creative writer at Columbia College, a Time Mirror Magazine editing award, the U.S.national James Jones First Novel Award and a substantial Creative New Zealand grant. She has also worked at Union Theological Seminary, the Vermont Studio Center, co-founded an Aboriginal art gallery in outback Australia and was, in 2021 and 2022, an Adjunct Professor of British and American Literature at the University of Texas Permian Basin. 

Louise has long served as a volunteer supporting refugees in New Zealand and Manhattan through the International Rescue Committee. Since 2023, she has lived in Hawaii with her husband Matthew Leonard and written for a global support group for adults abused as children.