My first conversation with Louise Stern was scrawled on scrap paper offered up from her yawning leather purse. As most friendships with Louise do, our friendship began through writing, because she’s deaf. She’s the one friend I keep up with primarily via transatlantic missives, and I open fat envelopes from London every few months with singular pleasure. That’s the thing about memory – it thrives on images and senses, pulling from a barrage of multi-sensory information a version of truth. And once remembered, a moment is described with a particular slant of meaning, with an eye toward creating a picture that another person can see. That’s how we write letters, and Louise’s do just that. In her letters she describes the old men in Wellies who populate her neighborhood on a rainy Saturday or the strange pleasure of waking up with a hangover headache, which allows her to spend the day in bed — little scenes that I can picture vividly.

Some time ago, though, I came across a stack of crumpled pages – it was a conversation Louise had four years ago with my then brand new boyfriend, at our favorite meeting place, a self-consciously cheesy bar in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Waitresses came and went in cowboy hats and holsters, carrying trays of nachos and green-chilli cheeseburgers. Louise and my boyfriend sat at a booth, supervised by a glittery photograph of a serene cowgirl, and chatted on paper. In hurriedly scrawled longhand, their conversation captures that brief moment in time just as it was — more accurately, if less vividly, than an authorial description recalled from memory could. A record of a conversation is an artifact of a relationship, a snapshot of what was actually experienced between two people, in the moment that it was experienced, and in that way, it’s accurate, though it’s far less sensory than my memories of late nights spent at that kitschy bar eating gooey quesadillas, or Louise’s of rainy Saturdays in London.

Louise’s recent art addresses, first and foremost, real snippets from her daily correspondences, such as the one described above. These conversations, scrawled on menus and expired calendars, are plucked from the bar booths and park benches of real life. They provide a glimpse of real experiences. An elemental narrative unfolds naturally over a prescribed period of time, and we even glean a rough sense of character, setting, and tone from the hurriedly jotted words, as if collecting clues. But as I fill in details, imagining settings and actors, I’m also reminded of how much of life isn’t really about words, it’s about people, about complex interactions in specific circumstances. I’m reminded about how much we don’t know about these people — how much we have to invent — when all we have to go on is language. And also, how much our brains take in to make inferences, to pull from a few scraps of conversation a sense of meaning.

What makes this kind of presentation different from typical narratives is that these dialogues aren’t seen through an author’s filter - rather, they’re presented as they actually existed, word for word and person to person. Unlike most literature, where we’re allowed certain kinds of intimacy and withheld others — where we’re guided through a narrative from behind a distinct set of eyes — here we’re able to draw our own conclusions about the characters and about Louise. We’re removed from the context of the interaction – an orientation that leaves us feeling both welcome and held at arm’s length, eavesdropping on the outskirts of other people’s lives. Being distant from the original author/reader dichotomy, we are able to move freely into our own perceptions because Louise gives us room to do so, presenting this information with refreshing neutrality. She becomes vulnerable to our judgment, too.

Last year Louise published a book of her written conversations called “A Strange Story”. Of course we can picture the man she converses with at a “job do” in a London Bar. We imagine him as tall and skinny, wearing a suit and a loosened neck-tie, and he’s already three sheets to the wind when we encounter him discussing Eva Longoria with Louise. He’s had a long week, full of cubicle work in his beige office building. He’s got more money than he has time to use it, but that’s only one reason he’s buying Louise beers in a spare, industrial-looking bar. The other is that he’s desperate, not just sexually desperate — desperate desperate. I sense this somehow in his happily drunk word-choice, in his insistence that Eva Longoria IS HOT.

More elusive, however, is the mysterious male figure who “suspects he’s quietly in love” with Louise in “A Strange Story about Love.” He’s hard to read, and not just because his handwriting is unfamiliar and messy. He’s hard to read because he says things like, “I suspect I’m quietly in love with you.” I cannot create a picture of him that isn’t dark and shadowy – and maybe that’s because everything he says is shadowy, not quite what it seems. The lack of detail in all of these conversations forces you to literally “take a person at their word,” and there’s a kind of emptiness to a person who is reduced to his or her conversations. They’re a bare outline, a brief sketch, as elliptical as their words. Even anger reads a bit tamely here, without a particular lens to view it with. In a way that I’ve come to see as characteristic of Louise, her comments are direct and biting, but being handwritten, they come across as sparse and isolated. Like emails or text messages, they read less violently than a verbal dialogue of conflict. Without contextual details — the expression on someone’s face, the way they speak, the emphasis they put on certain words — it’s hard to say with any certainty what the underlying truth of the situation is. It’s hard to know the characters, hard to relate to their dialogue.

The conversations Louise offers up are surprisingly intimate, yet anonymity divides us from the true story. Though a few pages of these written conversations often distill the essence of entire relationships, they’re also punctuated by an acute sense of what isn’t shared. And, it’s strange, but my sense of removal from the situations outlined here evokes a certain loneliness in me. Maybe it’s the loneliness of voyeurism. Or maybe it’s a sadness that’s more related to the failure of words, our inability to accurately communicate through language alone. What about the cowgirl waitresses and the gooey quesadillas at that Western bar? Aren’t the grease stains and the water rings on these pages somehow more indicative of an experience than the words that passed between two people? In a world full of language – a world literally saturated with literature, film, social interactions and depictions of them, theatre, internet, newspapers and magazines, and contemporary critical analysis full of criticism and analysis – experiences are often seen as a sum of their words, or at least essential to them. But words aren’t essential to experience, and this is a theme that obsesses Louise.

Last week I went ice-fishing with some friends. We sat on upturned buckets in the middle of a frozen lake. We drank dark beer. At dusk we caught an eighteen-inch brown trout. It was slimy and dappled with pink spots. We hardly spoke, and when we did, it was about the weather, or the bait, or the depth of the water. What Louise does is remind us how much of a particular experience isn’t about language. Were I to reduce those quiet hours out on the lake to the words we actually uttered, were I to transcribe them as a document of the experience, they’d be transparently vacant, capturing only the bare outlines of what we actually shared. “Nice fish.” “My toes are freezing.” “Any luck?”

How would the reader know that the giant clouds above the mountains turned blue as dusk set in? How would they know the moment as I now recall it? How would they appreciate how still it was, how despite the harshness of the landscape — the knee deep snow, the rocky outcroppings, the huge sad-looking pine trees — the evening seemed restful, fresh snow silently remaking everything, the descending dusk weirdly comforting, enfolding? After a while we packed everything up and headed home in the companionable warmth of the car. Our cheeks ached from the cold. We shared a thermos of tea. In those moments, giddy from shared experience, sitting in collective silence, we are wise, and we understand our relationships better than we ever could by talking, or writing, them through the wringer.

Carrie Braman grew up in New Mexico and Vermont. She is a graduate student in creative writing at the University of Montana. She’s working on a collection of essays about search for authenticity, including a travel narrative about the search for authentic pie. She’s interested in food writing and art criticism, and plays the accordion.

Louise Stern is a native Californian. She now lives and works in London, and her art, which centres on ideas of language, communication, silence and isolation, has recently been shown in London, Cornwall, Geneva, New York City, Barcelona, Madrid and Albania. Her first book of short stories with Granta Books is coming
out in 2010. How to Live is proud to be publishing the Diario throughout April.