I thought this was going to be about book covers, but am I wrong in thinking that this is more about formatting? As someone else said, it sounds like this detracted from the reading experience, and the saving grace was that you were able to more clearly see your friend as you knew them in the writing because of it.

I think to a certain extent authors having control over how their book is formatted works is cool. Lemony Snicket had that one chapter/couple of pages that was just a word repeated over and over, or something like that.