Presser Makes Facebook Friends Real Friends

The Chicago media has been actively following ArLynn Presser’s quest to meet all 335 of her Facebook friends (she has many more now) this year. 

Presser is Fritz Leiber’s granddaughter. She is the author of two dozen books, most of them romance novels published under the pen name Vivian Leiber.

Her travels eventually will take her to three continents. You can follow her progress on her WordPress blog.

The Chicago Tribune’s Sunday section ran a lengthy profile with some poignant family history:

Given up for adoption just before her third birthday, she endured a rocky childhood with her adoptive family and, later, in foster care…

[Her] biological father, Justin Leiber…, too, is a Facebook friend, whom she first tracked down through a private detective when she was 25. For her Facebook experiment, she traveled last winter to see him in Tallahassee, where he is a philosophy professor and writer.

A video post from that trip shows Presser retreating to a bathroom after her father guided her through the photos in his office; not one was of her or her sons. “I thought I was coming here because, well, yeah, he’s my Facebook friend, but I thought I was his daughter,” Presser says tearfully in the video. “He is just a guy who has a family, and I’m not part of that family.”

[Thanks to Steven H Silver for the story.]

One thought on “Presser Makes Facebook Friends Real Friends

  1. I know exactly how she feels.

    “You make your friends, you make your enemies, but family? That’s in the stars.” — Miles O’Brien, Star Trek: The Next Generation

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