To tell the story of friendship, Ann Patchett includes fragments and excerpts from Lucy's letters to her. "Dearest Anvil??" Lucy wrote Ann after six years of their friendship:

dearest deposed president of some now defunct but lovingly remembered country, dearest to me, I can find no suitable words of affection for you, words that will contain the whole of your wonderfulness to me. You will have to make due with being my favorite bagel, my favorite blue awning above some great little café where the coffee is strong but milky and had real texture to it.

And years later, Lucy wrote from Prague, where she'd found a small museum that housed drawings by children in a concentration camp at Terezin. She described being affected by a particular drawing most likely done by a seven- or eight-year-old:

First on the left was just a sort of free-floating head, rather comically and ineptly drawn: a sort of rectangle with a funny blob for a nose. Next to that was another head, lower down, obviously a cartoon version of a fishbone: they were the person's ribs. And standing over that was another figure?¦and then another awful terrible body of ribs. It had arms also, and one bone in the arm was drawn much differently than the rest of the drawing: very carefully, and heavier: the drawer obviously spent most of his or her time on this detail...and I could even imagine they were proud of it. It was a bone, drawn in cartoon-understanding of armbones?¦The rest of the arm was only a scrawl, and you could just barely see it was holding a sickle?¦It was a child's version of death. I am never ever ever going to get that drawing out of my head.

"Dearest Anngora, my cynical pirate of the elusive heart, my self winding watch, my showpiece, my shoelace, how are you?" Lucy wrote later after she refused Ann's invitation to live with her in Nashville, where Ann was teaching and could have cared for Lucy, providing food and shelter.

In a later letter again addressed to Dearest Angora, Lucy wrote:

While in Florida I bought you a trinket, a jewelry roll-up bag, at a street vendor...now it seems like a dumb gift, and ugly, but part of learning to be a good friend is not giving into fears that are ultimately narcissistic. So here, a roll up jewelry bag: if I could fill it with its namesake.

From the beginning, we know that Lucy will die young, but from the middle of the book onward, I know I do not want her life and Ann's connection to her to ever end. This charming and well-realized account of the effect two writers had on each other and their collaboration of the spirit is spellbinding.

What more fitting tribute to friendship can we carry away from this book but the commitment to writing our own tributes? We can take a lesson from Ann Patchett's way of using Lucy's letters: