Lucy Grealy, author of Autobiography of a Face, and five-time novelist Ann Patchett were acquaintances at Sarah Lawrence, where Lucy was legendary as a poet and inspired her classmates with her courage in facing and healing from constant surgeries to restore her face, scared and disfigured from cancer surgery when she was nine. When they were both entering the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program at the University of Iowa Lucy heard that Ann was making a summer trip to find an apartment. Ann received a letter from Lucy asking her to look for one for her as well. When Ann found that the price of rent made separate places unaffordable for each of them, she rented a two-bedroom unit in a duplex and Ann and Lucy became roommates.

Ann Patchett describes Lucy’ walking into their place shortly after Ann arrived that fall:

When I turned around to say hello, she shot through the door with a howl. In a second she was in my arms, leaping up onto me, her arms locked around my neck, her legs wrapped around my waist, ninety-five pounds that felt no more than thirty. She was crying into my hair. She squeezed her legs tighter. It was not a greeting as much as it was a claim: she was staking out this spot on my chest as her own and I was to hold her for as long as she wanted to stay.

At Iowa, where no one knew Lucy, classmates often questioned Ann about her ability to live with Lucy, whose disfigurement, they assumed, was too upsetting to live around. Ann had for years admired Lucy’s heart, mind and spirit and their friendship deepened quickly as they wrote and taught and shared their dreams.

 The story of the women’s friendship spans the years in Iowa and beyond, when with published and acclaimed books under their belts, Lucy’s needs remained paramount in Ann’s life. Ultimately, Lucy’s battle with heroin addiction ruined the ease of their friendship. Lucy dies during the cycle of months when Ann is at her most impatient with her. Mourning her friend, Ann soothes herself by writing a memoir, “That was part of Lucy’s genius in having so many friends. We all lost our patience with her, but never at the same time. If one of us was tired, there was always someone else to pick up the lamp and lead her home.” For Ann “home” is now the immortalization and evocation of a devoted friendship. Lucy hated dealing with her mail and didn’t open it. When bags of it depressed her, Ann had them sent to her to go through. Lucy needed bailing out financially; she usually didn’t save for financial droughts during times of success. She didn’t meet contract deadlines for books and she lost contracts. Lucy needed company when she faced months of surgery and recovery, from bone grafts and other procedures to restore her jaw. What some might have brushed off as codependence, in Ann’s understanding and love, was true need. Ann found she was inspired to use her best self in helping Lucy.

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:

If you have letters from a significant relationship with a friend, lover, spouse, child, relative, colleague or mentor, take them out, put them in chronological order and read through them. Imagine writing an essay, poems or memoir chapters “between the letters.” Choose a few of the letters that you feel inspire you to write about what was going on during the time of the letters. Start your writing and then include a passage or more from one of the letters you have chosen. Then return to your own writing and again include a passage from a later letter. Keep interspersing your writing and excerpts of letters until you feel you have told a story.

If you have wanted to do something with a collection of letters you have saved or if you have wanted to write about particular people or periods of time in your life, Ann Patchett’s book will provide a useful strategy for finding your way into the time period you have in mind.

If you don’t have letters to use as the bones to hang your writing on, you might start by writing letters to the person you want to write about or to one you knew during the time you want to write about. Address this person, whether he or she is alive or dead, with a play on the name or a pet name. Be poetic in the way that Lucy was and let the salutations evoke what the person meant to you. Tell your heart as it was during the time you are writing about. Write another letter about another part of the time you knew that person. Do this until you feel you have enough letters to cover the time span you want to write about. Then write “between the letters.”

I imagine that whether you write between passages from letters sent to you or between passages in letters you create now, you will tell a full and focused story. You will definitely get a good taste of how this can work by reading Ann Pachett’s tender and wonderful memoir, Truth and Beauty.