There is a rule in writing workshops that a coincidence that would get you laughed out of a fiction seminar is somehow allowed to happen in real life, and Lizzie Valverde and Katy Olson are proof.
“If I workshopped this in a fiction class, I’d be run out,” Olson told ABC News, which is about the most writerly way imaginable to describe finding your long-lost sister sitting across a seminar table.
In January 2013, both women were nontraditional students at Columbia University’s School of General Studies, back in college in their thirties and chasing the same dream of becoming writers. On the first day of a literary reporting course, the class did the usual round of introductions, and Valverde shared the story of her childhood and her closed adoption. Across the room, something started clicking for Olson, and it wasn’t a vague feeling. It was specific.
Olson, as it turned out, had been quietly searching for her older sister for some time. She’d grown up knowing she had an older sibling who’d been adopted by a family under the name Lizzie Delgado, and she’d even found a likely match on Facebook: a woman with a young daughter who had run a small children’s boutique and ended up at Columbia. She’d messaged her and gotten no response. Then that same woman, now going by her married name, Valverde, opened her mouth in a writing class and started narrating the exact story Olson had been piecing together for months.
After class, Olson approached her and started asking questions. Were you given up for adoption at birth? Yes. Was your birth mother a young woman from Tampa? Yes.
“I started asking her questions and I was trying not to appear insane, but I guess I failed,” Olson told WABC-TV.
Valverde, getting rapid-fire questions about details no stranger should know, could only manage one response, which has become the line everyone quotes: “Is this real life?”
The detail that turns this from a nice coincidence into something more poignant is what Valverde had believed up to that moment. She knew her birth mother had had another baby after her. But her adoptive mother had been told the second child might not survive birth due to complications, and when no further news ever came, the family assumed the baby had died. So Valverde hadn’t been failing to look for her sister. She thought she was looking at a closed chapter. Olson wasn’t a sister she’d lost track of; she was a sister Valverde thought she’d never had.
They didn’t immediately run to the press, which is its own quiet point in their favor. The sisters kept the whole thing private for about a year and a half, simply getting to know each other and comparing notes on the strange, overlapping shapes of their lives.
“We just ordered pitchers of beer and started going back and forth with our lives and biographical details,” Olson told ABC News. “Like, do you like chicken wings? I like chicken wings. Do you have a weird pinkie toe? I have a weird pinkie toe.”
Their birth mother, Leslie Parker, was a teenager in Florida when she gave both girls up for adoption, one year apart. Her life after that was not an easy one, marked by years of hardship she has been candid about. And like her daughters, she had always wanted to be a writer and never got the chance. She framed her decision to place the girls for adoption as the best gift she could give them.
“I wanted to give them the best possible future they could have, and it wouldn’t have been with me,” Parker told CBS News. “As sad as it is to give up your own children, I felt the best gift I could give them was to let them go so they had a chance.”
There’s a particular ache in the way she sees it now, telling reporters that in her daughters she sees what she had the potential to be.
The whole thing reached its emotional climax at Valverde’s graduation. Olson had finished at Columbia the year before and came to watch her sister cross the stage. But the bigger first was for Parker, who had reconnected with Valverde years earlier but had never met Olson in person.
The day before the ceremony, mother and daughter met for the first time in more than three decades, and Olson, by her own account, ran over and hugged her. The two then sat side by side watching Valverde graduate.
“To see both my moms together, that’s a pretty intense moment,” Valverde said. “It felt like all the things that matter in my life were very much there.”
Valverde, for the record, graduated Phi Beta Kappa and summa cum laude, then went on to pursue an MFA, because apparently being the protagonist of an unpublishable short story wasn’t enough of a flex.
