Contemporary Authors

• Small Fry ( memoir) Grove Press (New York, NY), 2018

1. Small fry LCCN 2018026614 Type of material Book Personal name Brennan-Jobs, Lisa, 1978- author. Main title Small fry / Lisa Brennan-Jobs. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Grove Press, [2018] Description xii, 381 pages ; 24 cm ISBN 9780802128232 (hardcover) CALL NUMBER QA76.2.J63 B75 2018 Copy 1 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Brennan-Jobs

  Lisa Brennan-Jobs
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  Lisa Brennan-Jobs
  Brennan-Jobs in August 2005 (A JPG image)
  Brennan-Jobs in August 2005
  Born Lisa Nicole Brennan
  May 17, 1978 (age 40)
  Portland, Oregon, U.S.
  Residence Brooklyn, New York
  Nationality American
  Other names Lisa Nicole Brennan-Jobs
  Alma mater Harvard University
  Occupation Writer
  Spouse(s) Bill
  Children 1
  Parents
  Steve Jobs (father)
  Chrisann Brennan (mother)
  Relatives Mona Simpson (aunt)
  Lisa Nicole Brennan-Jobs (née Brennan; May 17, 1978) is an American writer. She is the daughter of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and Chrisann Brennan. For several years, Jobs denied paternity, which led to a legal case and various media reports in the early days of Apple. Lisa and Steve Jobs eventually reconciled, and he accepted his paternity. Brennan-Jobs later worked as a journalist and magazine writer.

  An early Apple computer, the Apple Lisa, is named after Brennan-Jobs, and she has been depicted in a number of biographies and films, including the biopics Pirates of Silicon Valley, Jobs, and Steve Jobs. A fictionalized version of her is a major character in her aunt Mona Simpson's novel A Regular Guy.

  Contents
  1 Birth and the Apple Lisa
  2 Paternity case and reconciliation
  3 Education and career
  4 Publications
  5 In media
  6 Personal life
  7 References
  8 External links
  Birth and the Apple Lisa
  Lisa Nicole Brennan was born on May 17, 1978 on Robert Friedland's All One Farm commune outside of Portland, Oregon.[1][2] Her mother, Chrisann Brennan, and her father, Steve Jobs, first met at Homestead High School in Cupertino, California in 1972 and had an on-off relationship for the next five years.[1][2] In 1977, after Jobs had co-founded Apple Inc., he and Brennan moved into a house with their friend Daniel Kottke near the company's office in Cupertino, where they all worked.[1][2][3] It was during this period that Brennan became pregnant with Lisa. Jobs, however, did not assume responsibility for the pregnancy, which led Brennan to end the relationship, leave their shared home, and support herself by cleaning houses.[2]

  In 1978, Brennan moved to the All One Farm commune to have the baby. Jobs was not present for the baby's birth and only came up three days later after Robert Friedland, the farm's owner and a friend of Jobs' from Reed College, persuaded him to do so. Brennan and Jobs named the baby Lisa. Jobs named the computer project he was working on, the Apple Lisa, after her. Shortly after, Jobs publicly denied that he was the child's father. He claimed that the Apple Lisa was not named for her, and had his team come up with the phrase "Local Integrated Systems Architecture" as an alternative explanation for the project's name.[1][4] Decades later, Jobs admitted that "obviously, it was named for my daughter."[1]

  Paternity case and reconciliation
  Jobs, however, publicly denied paternity after she was born, which led to a legal case. Even after a DNA paternity test established him as her father, he continued to deny it.[1][4][5] The resolution of the legal case required him to provide Brennan with $385 per month and to reimburse the state for the money she had received from welfare. After Apple went public and Jobs became a multimillionaire, he increased the payment to $500 a month.[2] Michael Moritz interviewed Jobs, Brennan, and a number of others for the 1982 Time Person of the Year special issue, released on January 3, 1983. In his interview, Jobs questioned the reliability of the paternity test, which had found that the "probability of paternity for Jobs, Steven... is 94.1%".[6] Jobs responded by arguing that "28% of the male population of the United States could be the father."[1][2][6] Rather than name him "Person of the Year", as he and many others expected while giving the interviews, the issue was instead titled "Machine of the Year: The Computer Moves In."[7] The thematic change occurred after Moritz heard about Brennan-Jobs as well as Jobs's management style.[1][2]

  Years later, after Jobs left Apple, he acknowledged Lisa and attempted to reconcile with her. Chrisann Brennan wrote that "he apologized many times over for his behavior" to her and Lisa and "said that he never took responsibility when he should have, and that he was sorry."[2] After reconciling with her, nine-year-old Lisa wanted to change her last name and Jobs was happy and relieved to agree to it. Jobs legally altered her birth certificate, changing her name from Lisa Brennan to Lisa Brennan-Jobs.[8] Brennan credits the change in Jobs to the influence of Brennan-Jobs' newly found biological aunt, author Mona Simpson, who worked to repair the relationship between Brennan-Jobs and her father.[2]

  According to Fortune magazine, in his will, Jobs left Lisa a multimillion-dollar inheritance.[9]

  Education and career
  When Brennan-Jobs was living with her mother, she attended The Nueva School and Lick Wilmerding High School. Later, after she moved in with her father, she attended Palo Alto High School. She enrolled at Harvard University in 1996 and studied overseas for one year at King's College London.[1] While a student at Harvard, she wrote for The Harvard Crimson.[10] She graduated in 2000 and subsequently moved to Manhattan to work as a writer.[1] She has written for The Southwest Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Harvard Advocate, Spiked, Vogue, and O, The Oprah Magazine.[4][5]

  Publications
  In March 2018, Brennan-Jobs announced that she was writing Small Fry,[11] a memoir detailing her childhood and the complex and sometimes difficult relationship she had had with her father.[12][13] The book was published on September 4, 2018.[14]

  In media
  Brennan-Jobs has featured in several biographies of her father, including Walter Isaacson's 2011 authorized biography Steve Jobs. Mona Simpson's 1996 novel A Regular Guy is a fictionalized account based on the story of Brennan-Jobs and her parents.[1] She has been depicted in three biopic films: Brooke Radding portrayed her in the 1999 TNT TV film Pirates of Silicon Valley, while she is played as a child by Ava Acres, and as an adult by Annika Bertea, in the 2013 film Jobs. In the 2015 film Steve Jobs, directed by Danny Boyle, Brennan-Jobs is portrayed at different ages by Perla Haney-Jardine, Ripley Sobo, and Makenzie Moss. Steve Jobs screenwriter Aaron Sorkin said that he discussed the screenplay with Brennan-Jobs in advance and that she is the "heroine of the film".[15]

  Personal life
  Brennan-Jobs resides in Brooklyn with her husband, Bill, their son, and her two stepdaughters.[16]

• London Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/sep/01/daughter-steve-jobs-denied-lisa-brennan-jobs

  QUOTED: "I wish we’d had more time together after he’d unburdened himself of his guilt, because I think we had a similar sense of humour and it was always a delightful surprise how much fun we could have."

  Interview
  The daughter Steve Jobs denied: ‘Clearly I was not compelling enough for my father'
  Emma Brockes
  Lisa Brennan-Jobs talks about how she learned to love the co-founder of Apple, who claimed for years she wasn’t his child
  • ‘He called me Small Fry’: scroll down for an extract from Brennan-Jobs’s book
  Emma Brockes
  @emmabrockes
  Sat 1 Sep 2018 05.00 EDT Last modified on Mon 3 Sep 2018 04.53 EDT

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  Steve Jobs with Lisa in 1989, when Lisa was 10.
  Father and daughter in 1989, when Lisa was 10. Photograph: Ed Kashi/VII/Redux/Eyevine
  It is a good thing, says Lisa Brennan-Jobs, that she did not write her memoir of growing up in the shadow of her father, Steve Jobs, when she was still in her 20s. The 40-year-old, who lives with her husband Bill and their four-month-old son Thomas in Brooklyn, could not have done justice to the story, she says, because, “I don’t know if I’d have been able to get over the self-pity.” She is also glad she didn’t wait until her 40s to write the book, when the experience of having Thomas has made her “softer, more forgiving”. Instead, she spent the best part of her 30s writing a book that is neither self-pitying nor soft, but is a portrait of a childhood in which the key factor is not that her father was a man who changed the world, but that he was a man who, over and over, tried and failed in mostly ordinary ways.

  It is relatively well known by now that Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple who died eight years ago of pancreatic cancer, had a child with his high-school sweetheart when the pair were in their early 20s, and that a few years later, when on paper at least he was worth hundreds of millions, had to be sued for child support – events around which the whiff of scandal still lingers.

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  There is no point denying what happens when one first meets Brennan-Jobs: the extent to which one looks through her for her father’s outline, in terms of both appearance (she is fair-skinned and, as her father himself noted, very much his child around the eyebrows), and her manner (animated to the point of nervy). There is also no avoiding the fact that interest in Brennan-Jobs is stoked by her father’s fame, or that walking into her Brooklyn apartment, which is small and three storeys up, one’s thoughts immediately jump to the question of what happened to the inheritance. (And again, when it transpires it’s a spare property, used as an office, and not the house that she lives in.) These are the rapid mental calculations that Brennan-Jobs has grown used to seeing flash across strangers’ faces, and in spite of her chipper demeanour she gives the impression of being exhausted by them. So, too, by the central drama of her early life as she tells it: that Steve Jobs, a man lauded by the world as a visionary, appeared for long stretches not to love her, or even to admit she was his.

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  She can say all this now, and with a smile, but it wasn’t always this way. “When I first started writing the book, I wanted to garner self-pity, because I felt really badly about myself,” she says. Thomas lolls on her lap, and she looks slightly daffy with happiness. “I mean, gosh, that’s gone. A lot of the veil of shame has dissipated and I don’t know if it’s age, or writing the book, or both. But I wanted to have some scenes that would make you feel really bad for me, because I felt ashamed of the fact that I had this father – clearly I was not compelling enough for my father, this incredible man, to unequivocally own. I would think, was I an ugly baby? I even asked him that once. And I knew it was cheesy and facetious even as I asked it, or possibly manipulative. But it was a feeling that kept coming up because he wouldn’t look at my baby albums. I’d leave them out, and then once he was like, ‘Who’s that?’ And I was like, ‘It’s me!’”

  Brennan-Jobs talks very quickly and often backtracks to undercut what she has said – not, I think, because she is unsure of herself, but because she is operating in a constant mode of simultaneous translation: there is the meaning of what she says in the moment she says it, and there is the use to which it will be put, at some unspecified date in the future, in service to the myth of Steve Jobs. It gives her the brittle air of someone running for political office.

  She is also wrestling with an origin story that has been interpreted so many times by other people that she must fight tooth and nail to possess her own story. In outline: Steve Jobs and Chrisann Brennan got together as hippyish teens at high school in Cupertino, California, and were on-again off-again until Brennan got pregnant, at which point they were decisively driven apart. Jobs had just founded Apple with Steve Wozniak and was working on early versions of what would become the Macintosh. To put it mildly, fatherhood was not in his plan. And yet, after the baby’s birth, he called his early (failed) version of the personal computer the Lisa, then spent the next 20 years pretending the name was just a coincidence.

  Lisa Brennan-Jobs
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  Lisa Brennan-Jobs: ‘When he was engaged with work, he was often delightful. It was fun.’ Photograph: Caroll Taveras for the Guardian
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  It was the kind of infuriating denial that, according to Brennan-Jobs, characterised almost every stage of his parenting, including most famously his denial that she was his. Forced by the state to take a DNA test, Jobs quibbled with the results, and in 1982, when his daughter was five, told a journalist from Time magazine that “28% of the male population of the United States could be the father”.

  What was this? The best Brennan-Jobs can do at explaining is to say, “His love for me blindsided him. And then if you’re someone who’s used to controlling things, and succeeding at everything, and you find this one thing you can’t succeed at, it’s hard not to push it away.”

  He would not be the first man to ditch an unwanted child to focus on his own self-advancement, but what is interesting about the story is that Jobs never seemed quite able to make up his mind. For the first seven years of his daughter’s life he was almost entirely absent, after which he would drop by, occasionally, at one of the series of small houses where she lived with her mother – or else promise to drop by, then stand her up. Enough of a relationship developed that, when Brennan-Jobs fell out with her mother during adolescence, she was able to move in with Jobs. But it was never something she could rely on.

  Many of the most shocking scenes in the book turn on small acts of unkindness that seem to come from Jobs’ perpetual shock at having a daughter at all. “You’re not getting anything,” he snaps at nine-year-old Brennan-Jobs when she asks winsomely if she can have his Porsche when he’s done. “You understand? Nothing. You’re getting nothing.” When she lived with him as a teenager, he wouldn’t get the heating fixed in her room or have the dishwasher mended. He dragged his feet over her college fees at Harvard, refusing to pay after her first year, in retaliation for some perceived slight. (Wealthy neighbours who’d befriended her stepped in and paid, and it wasn’t until years later that Jobs reimbursed them.) He had stringent rules about how she had to behave in order to be considered part of his family: be home early, not spend too much time with her mother (whose requests for money enraged him in spite of his wealth), respect his authority as total.

  There is a small, excruciating scene in a restaurant, which takes place when Brennan-Jobs is a teenager and out to dinner with her parents and her teenage cousin, Sarah. Jobs becomes enraged when Sarah orders a burger – he hates meat – and, turning to the girl, says, “Have you ever thought about how awful your voice is? Please stop talking in that awful voice.”

  When I bring this up, Brennan-Jobs looks embarrassed and mutters something about her cousin’s voice actually being quite annoying. “I look back and think, was that a day when he learned that his company would fail? I don’t know what happened. I do remember that when he was in a mood you could tell.”

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  It is hard for her to resist rationalising away his worst behaviour. “It’s not a memoir of suffering,” she says forcefully. “There are those – people who were locked in closets. This had so much joy.”

  When I was growing up he wasn’t succeeding: not with me, not with his relationship, not with his work
  And after all, her life has been successful. After graduating from Harvard, Brennan-Jobs moved to England to do a postgraduate degree at King’s College London, and lived intermittently in the city for much of her 20s, working in finance and getting the occasional freelance journalism gig, before returning to the US to study creative writing.

  The fact is, she says, at least some of her father’s unpleasantness came from the fact he was awkward. “Really awkward. It’s hard to overstate that. I had a surprise party for my mother when I was eight [organised by Jobs’ then girlfriend, Tina], and he sat on the floor and his awkwardness had its own charisma. You could hardly pay attention to other things because you were so worried about him. Even at eight I felt it: ‘Oh God, are you OK?’ And people have been forgetting that he wasn’t successful when I was growing up. He wasn’t succeeding, not with me, not with his relationship – because he and Tina were off and on – not with his work. And he kept on trying, even though he kept on failing.”

  There is almost nothing about Apple in the book, beyond Brennan-Jobs’ timid boast to school friends that her father invented the Macintosh computer, and that’s because, she says, “I didn’t feel like my childhood was set up against his work. Because when he was engaged with work, he was often delightful. It was fun, we got to look at different things together… looking at font serifs is fun.”

  Steve Jobs in 1983, a few years after Lisa was born, with the Apple computer he named Lisa.
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  Steve Jobs in 1983, a few years after Lisa was born, with the Apple computer he named Lisa. He spent the next 20 years pretending the name was a coincidence. Photograph: Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
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  Looking back, she says, she supposes this was somewhat naive; clearly his ability to engage with Brennan-Jobs and her mother was indexed to what was happening at Apple. “When he wasn’t doing well at work, he’d come find us – his heart would open enough to allow us in. So I imagine we were in competition, not with his work per se, but with the state of mind that isn’t focused on family. It’s not a fun thing to be the person set up in opposition to the work everyone loves. And also… if he was able to love me more fully when his work wasn’t going well, then what am I? I’m the person carrying around the wish for his failure.”

  She adds quickly that she never did wish failure on him. She wished he’d be more charmed by her. She wished he’d be normal. “I was not capable of making him melty the way fathers seemed to be around daughters, and I of course took that personally.” She wished he knew better how to be around a child. “All I wanted was closeness and sweetness and for him to relieve me. To let me be the star, probably. To be like, ‘Well, how was your day?’ And to listen. And at such a young age, and so used to the spotlight, and to everybody fawning on him... he didn’t know how to be with me.” (She used to envy her three half-siblings, a brother and two sisters born when she was in her teens, and wonder if “maybe he was more conventional to them”. But she has doubts about that, too – she’s not convinced he was any more present in their lives than he was in hers.)

  It is still slightly amazing that she dared to write any of this. As a child, Brennan-Jobs’ fear of displeasing or disappointing her father was excruciating. When she was eight, it was established that she would spend every Wednesday night at his house, but she became so anxious that she wet the bed and her mother made other arrangements. This book would surely have enraged the control-freak side of Jobs, and yet, she believes, he gave her tacit permission. “There was a phrase that my father kept using at the end: ‘I owe you one, I owe you one.’ And I thought, ‘What an odd phrase.’ I had never heard him use it before. And he kept on repeating it and crying. And he was very serious about it. And there was a feeling I had that was, ‘OK, this. You can give me this, that I’m allowed to tell my story in the most honest, kindest way possible, and with love.’” (He once asked her if she was going to write about him and she replied, “No.”)

  It’s the love she returns to, again and again: the times he would come over with his roller skates when she was a child and they would skate for hours through the streets of Palo Alto; the time he sat in a freezing cold amphitheatre without a sweater, to watch a play starring her middle-school boyfriend. He was weird about sex, kissing and groping her stepmother in front of her and making jokes about how Lisa would grow up to be a stripper – things she concedes it is difficult to relay “so that it doesn’t sound creepy”. But even here, she is determined to defend her father’s efforts as “odd and wonderful”, an attempt by Jobs to strip sex of shame and insist on the prevalence of love, so that in spite of her parents’ woeful relationship, “I never felt that I was the unwanted spawn of an accidental coupling.”

  Lisa with her mother, Chrisann Brennan, in Saratoga, 1981
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  Lisa with her mother, Chrisann Brennan, in Saratoga, 1981. Photograph: Courtesy Lisa Brennan-Jobs
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  She wishes he could have resolved his “ambivalence and guilt” about her earlier on in their relationship, and after the tuition fee fight about Harvard there were long periods of silence between them in her 20s. But when he got ill, she remembered the other stuff. “It took me a long time to realise he was dying,” she says. “I couldn’t quite get it. And finally I thought, ‘Oh God, I’d better tell him some good things; he probably won’t care.’” She thanked him for his honesty about sex, “and it was like pouring water on dry ground. He was like, ‘I really tried!’ I thought: I didn’t know there was any back story behind his parenting, that he was being methodical.” And yet: “One of the difficult things you realise when you’re very sick is that the only thing you could do to make it better is time, and it’s the one thing you don’t have. And that is the position you don’t want to be in on your death bed.”

  In 2014, Brennan-Jobs learned there was a movie in the works based on Walter Isaacson’s authorised biography of her father. She hadn’t read the book in its entirety, but what she had read and heard of it, she hadn’t liked. And so she did something shrewdly calculating: she called Aaron Sorkin, who was writing the screenplay, and arranged to have coffee with him.

  In many ways, the film that came out in 2015, simply entitled Steve Jobs, is devoted to Brennan-Jobs: the blameless child who exposes and ultimately begins to resolve shortfalls in her famous father’s humanity.

  As it turns out, this was precisely Brennan-Jobs’ intention on meeting the screenwriter. “We had coffee three times and my goal was to charm him,” she says, “so that if he did put me in as a character in his movie, I would not be a bad character, or untrue. Because I heard that in Walter’s book I wasn’t coming home, I wasn’t visiting [Jobs]. And I did love my father. And so I sought Sorkin out, just to make sure he knew I was a human being.”

  Brennan-Jobs is clearly conflicted about her father’s approach to his fortune. While she was living in London, a friend of her father’s “called him and said, ‘Why don’t you just help her with some money?’ And he said, ‘No, I’m not going to send her money, because I’m not going to ruin her.’” These days Brennan-Jobs has convinced herself it would have been much worse to have been raised a spoilt heiress, or to have had a father who ignored her and then bought her off “with a pony and a few pretty dresses”.

  At other times, however, she finds it odd to have been so punitively treated, to have been, as she sees it, “the one other person who is supposed to uphold the value system that involves some degree of deprivation – except for him. He deprived himself. He had one house. But if he could go back, I imagine he would not have done to us what he did when I was little.”

  When he was dying, I said to him, ‘Maybe next time, if there is a next time, we can be friends’
  I suggest that Jobs’ decisions about money could seem spiteful at times, and she says, “But maybe he didn’t know how to do it.” However misguided he was, she believes it was still all about values, and “in moments of joy, he communicated a value system that I believed in”. Jobs didn’t believe in adornment, in his emotional as in his professional life, although of course the hair shirt can be as vain as the gold cuff links. At root, however, it was the dream of what having been a hippy once promised: “That there is an importance to simplicity and the best stuff is, ‘Did you do your work as well as you could? Did you love who you loved as well as you could?’ You don’t die and think, ‘How comfortable was I?’”

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  Jobs would seem to have failed substantially at the love part of these aphorisms, but the point, says his daughter, is that he tried. And when, for example, he snapped her head off for asking about the Porsche? “He was worried that I was going to be a little shit.” She smiles. “And maybe that was mixed in with not having wanted me at all.”

  These days, her idea of family is a million miles from the cold hearth of her father’s house, or the hippy chaos of her mother’s. Brennan-Jobs and her husband Bill, a software designer – “apparently that’s my type,” she says, drily – met online and “it was so wonderful, because for a while he didn’t know who my father was”. She only let him find out “when I knew he was smitten. That was so important to me. I sometimes feel, ‘Oh, I know my dad would’ve liked you’; he’s straightforward, kind, good.”

  Being in New York is important, too. Her father loved California and she needed to find space for herself elsewhere. And the fact is that the inheritance, said for each of the children to have been in the millions – the majority of Jobs’ $10bn fortune was reportedly left to his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs – has surely helped. “The story of the bitter, axe-grinding daughter – that’s where the inheritance question can play in. But I feel pretty at peace with what happened,” she says. “I wish we’d had more time together after he’d unburdened himself of his guilt, because I think we had a similar sense of humour and it was always a delightful surprise how much fun we could have.” In fact, she says, “When he was dying, I said to him – and it was a little bit of a stab, but – I was like, ‘Maybe next time, if there is a next time, we can be friends.’ And what I meant by that was, wouldn’t it be fun to be colleagues and work together?” She understood, at some level, that his heart was elsewhere, that it was the people he worked with – or the work itself – that got the very best of him.

  In spite of his regret and his sorrow, in some ways her dad was himself up until the very end, and there is consolation in that, too – the integrity of even an unpleasant truth. “I remember when he was really sick, he was holding a whole bowl of candy and I teased him and said, ‘Hey, wanna share them?” She smiles. “And he responded, ‘No. They’re all mine.’”

  ‘I felt like we were the centre of the world’
  An exclusive extract from Small Fry by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

  Now on weekends when he was around, my father came over to take me skating, my mother waving goodbye to us as we set off. I was nine.

  By this time he’d been kicked out of his company, Apple. He was in the process of starting a new company called NeXT that would make computer hardware and software. I knew he also owned a computer animation company called Pixar that made a short film about two lamps, a parent and child.

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  He called me Small Fry. “Hey, Small Fry, let’s blast. We’re livin’ on borrowed time.”

  I assumed small fry meant the kind of french fries left at the bottom of the bag, cold and crusty; I thought he was calling me a runt, or misbegotten. Later, I learned fry is an old word for young fishes sometimes thrown back into the sea to give them more time to grow.

  “OK, Fat Fry, let’s go,” I said, once my skates were on. Sometimes he worried he was getting too thin. “They say I need to gain weight,” he said. “Who?” I asked. “People at work,” he said, standing in the middle of the room with his skates on. “What do you guys think?” Other times he worried he was getting a paunch, and asked us about that, too.

  We would head for Stanford University. On this day the road was still wet from rain.

  The palm trees that gave Palm Drive its name grew in the dirt between the sidewalk and the road. We looked up at the hills beyond the university – from far away they appeared smooth and unblemished. The neon-green blades shot up through the dirt clods two or three days after the first heavy rain and remained through winter. “I love the green hills,” he said, “but I like them best when they’re yellow, dry.”

  “I like them green,” I said, not understanding how anyone could like them when they were dead.

  We reached the Oval and then the Stanford quadrangle with its covered, shaded pathways made of diamonds of cement in alternating earth-toned colours, like a faded harlequin costume.

  “Want to get on my shoulders?”

  He leaned down and grasped under my armpits – I was small for my age – and hoisted me up. His weight tilted and bobbed. We did a loop around the square, under the arches, past the gold numbers on the glass doors. He held my shins in his hands, but let go when he started to lose his balance. He tripped, tripped again, struggling to stay upright – I swayed, terrifyingly high up. And then he fell. On the way down I worried for myself, for my face and my knees, the parts of me that might hit the ground. Over time I learned he would always fall. Still, I let him carry me because it seemed important to him. I felt this like a change of pressure in the air: this was part of his notion of what it meant to be a father and daughter.

  We got up and brushed ourselves off – he wound up with a bruise on his butt and a scrape on his hand; I got a skinned knee – and headed for the drinking fountain at the side of the quadrangle.

  On the way back through the campus, on the sloping downhill on the rough cement, I was a tuning fork for the road, flying out ahead of him. “Ah AH!” I sang, my throat vibrating with the stones. “You’re all right, kid,” he said. “But don’t let it go to your head.”

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  “I won’t,” I said. I’d never heard the phrase before: Let It Go To Your Head.

  Lisa with Steve Jobs in San Francisco, early 80s.
  Lisa with her father in San Francisco, early 80s. Photograph: Courtesy Lisa Brennan-Jobs
  “You know, I didn’t go to college,” he said. “Maybe you won’t go either. Better just to go out and get into the world.”

  If I didn’t go to college, I would be like him. At that moment, I felt like we were the centre of the world. He carried it with him, this feeling of centre.

  “They teach you how other people think, during your most productive years,” he said. “It kills creativity. Makes people into bozos.”

  It made sense to me. Still, I wondered why he always wanted to skate around Stanford, why he seemed to love it, if he didn’t believe in it.

  On University Avenue he pointed to a bum crouched in a nook with a cardboard sign. “That’s me in two years,” he said.

  ***

  When my father and I got back to my block, kids were out playing in the yards and on the sidewalks. We stopped across from our house, and a few men who lived nearby gathered around my father – three fathers holding three babies. They wanted to know what he thought about this or that. The mothers chased after the toddlers to give the fathers a chance to talk. I stood nearby, proud that it was my father they wanted to talk with. They discussed people I’d never heard of and companies I didn’t know.

  The babies began to fuss, squirming, letting out little cries and yelps.

  My father continued to talk – hardware, software – the same discussions that seemed to come up over and over with all the men we saw in Palo Alto those days. Soon, all three babies began to wail and the fathers had to stop talking and take them away.

  ***

  This was around the time, my mother would say later, that my father fell in love with me. “He was in awe of you,” she said, but I don’t remember it. “You know she’s more than half me, more than half my genetic material,” he said. The announcement caught my mother off-guard. She didn’t know how to respond. Maybe he said it because he’d started feeling close to me and wanted a greater share.

  “You gotta stop and smell the roses,” he said, on another skate. He said it urgently, then stopped and put his nose deep in a rose and sighed. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was only an expression. But soon I got into it anyway, and we looked for the best rosebushes in the neighbourhood, crisscrossing the streets. I noticed good ones he’d missed behind fences, and we trespassed across lawns on the toes of our skates to get to them.

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  • This is an edited extract from Small Fry by Lisa Brennan-Jobs, published on 13 September by Grove Press UK at £16.99. Order a copy for £14.44 from guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846

  Comments on this piece are premoderated to ensure the discussion remains on the topics raised by the article.

  Commenting on this piece? If you would like your comment to be considered for inclusion on Weekend magazine’s letters page in print, please email weekend@theguardian.com, including your name and address (not for publication).

• NPR - https://www.npr.org/2018/08/31/643582392/being-steve-jobs-daughter-in-small-fry

  QUOTED: "When I started writing it, there was a lot of self-pity. ... I would try to get the reader to feel bad for me and it turned out that it doesn't really work on the page. ... So what I had to do was go back into the stories that weren't working and understand where my part in them was. I mean, a friend said to me: 'Hey Lisa, I knew you then. You kind of got your way. I don't really believe this victim stuff.'"
  "We had a kind of Hollywood ending, which I didn't think would happen. So strange. You see these movies where people apologize in the end and you think there's no way that it will ever happen in life, but it did happen."

  A Memoir Of An '80s California Childhood — And Being Steve Jobs' Daughter

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  August 31, 20185:14 AM ET
  Heard on Morning Edition
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  RACHEL MARTIN
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  Small Fry
  Small Fry
  by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

  Hardcover, 381 pages

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  The book Small Fry is a memoir of a girl growing up in 1980s California as the daughter of a single mom — an artist who is frequently moving from place to place, never able to make ends meet. The author insists it's universal, a coming-of-age story amid the scent of eucalyptus and West Coast sunlight.

  Except the writer's father is Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple.

  Jobs' Biography: Thoughts On Life, Death And Apple
  AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
  Jobs' Biography: Thoughts On Life, Death And Apple
  In 'Steve Jobs,' A Life Told In 3 Acts — And Countless Complexities
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  In 'Steve Jobs,' A Life Told In 3 Acts — And Countless Complexities
  Lisa Brennan-Jobs was born when Steve Jobs was young and focused on his work, and he didn't want to be a father. But in her book, Brennan-Jobs is trying not to present herself as a victim.

  "When I started writing it, there was a lot of self-pity," she says in an interview. "I would try to get the reader to feel bad for me and it turned out that it doesn't really work on the page. ... So what I had to do was go back into the stories that weren't working and understand where my part in them was. I mean, a friend said to me: 'Hey Lisa, I knew you then. You kind of got your way. I don't really believe this victim stuff.' "

  As an example, she notes that there was no "working heat in the downstairs part of the house when I lived with my dad." It could be read that her father was depriving her room of heat — but she demurs.

  "No, but the truth is Northern California doesn't really get that cold," Brennan-Jobs says. "I could have changed rooms if I'd needed to. It was a stand-in for something else, and I'm not saying that it's not an element of the story, but when I could see underneath my own stories and sort of was on to myself a bit, it opened the book up for me."

  It might be noted: Small Fry did not sit well with other members of Steve Jobs' family. Jobs' wife Laurene Powell Jobs, their kids, and his sister Mona Simpson put out a statement saying the book "differs dramatically from our memories of those times. The portrayal of Steve is not the husband and father we knew. Steve loved Lisa, and he regretted that he was not the father he should have been during her early childhood. It was a great comfort to Steve to have Lisa home with all of us during the last days of his life, and we are all grateful for the years we spent together as a family."

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  Interview Highlights
  On how she thought about Steve Jobs before he acknowledged publicly that he was her father

  Enlarge this image
  The author of Small Fry, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, walks with her mother, Chrisann Brennan, in Palo Alto, Calif. in the early 1990s.
  Courtesy of Lisa Brennan-Jobs
  Brennan-Jobs: My mother had kept the fact of my father alive for me in the sense that she — she knew him well, she knew his better nature and she knew he was my father. So she had, I think quite skillfully, kept him alive for me so that when he did decide to become more a part of my life there was a place for him in my heart.

  Martin: How did you walk through the world knowing that you were the daughter of Steve Jobs? How did you navigate that part of your identity?

  Brennan-Jobs: I would use anything I had. I think there's something about being a kid where you don't really have much yet. So maybe you use your tennis shoes 'cause they're nice, or you use your – I don't know, maybe your parents have a pool or something. And so this is what I had. And I describe this in the book like — it was like an itch. Sometimes if I felt badly about myself I could slyly pull out that I have this famous father. And of course, it didn't really work, because I didn't have a nice—

  Martin: Right, it didn't scratch the itch.

  Brennan-Jobs: Well, also, it didn't seem real, right? Like, I didn't have the clothes that a kid with a famous rich dad would have, I didn't have the house, I didn't have the mannerisms, I didn't have the sense of entitlement. And I don't mean that in a bad way, I just — we didn't have the stuff. So I'd pull it out to try to make myself feel better or feel special. You know, these are things that I might have wanted to hide when I was writing the book. And I kind of just decided to jump into the points that I was ashamed of and see if it would resonate with other people.

  On Steve Jobs declining to share his financial wealth with her

  I think he knew that he hadn't done right by me, and he was also very young. But then there was something that he did later in my life which is — a lot of people might have then shoved money at me to try to compensate. But of course, money later doesn't compensate for money earlier. Money can be detrimental for kids. And I guess I would say about myself, like, I might have settled for it — I probably shouldn't say that. ... I just think, like, if he'd bought me a pony and bought everything I wanted, I think I might have been falsely soothed.

  Enlarge this image
  Lisa Brennan-Jobs is now 40 years old and lives in Brooklyn.
  Brigitte Lacombe/Grove Atlantic
  On whether she was ever angry with her father

  I think both of us went off and on. But there was a time when I was living in London after college. We weren't really in touch, and I — missing him, some misguided attempt to connect with him — I checked his website, and he said he had three children and not four. Oh, and I was so upset. Just this feeling of always wanting to be on the inside but being on the outside. And I guess the thing is: If you're on the comfy inner circle, you don't need to write a book to understand your life. But it was very painful to feel this kind of whiplash of being his daughter and then not being his daughter. And I actually called him at work and left a message and asked and told him about the work bio, and I called my aunts and I called my mom and I tried to get them to change it. Which of course is a little sad because someone changes something because he asked them to be different ... and he changed it for about a week and then it was changed back — I don't know what happened.

  On her last conversation with her father

  He was apologizing ... we had a kind of Hollywood ending, which I didn't think would happen. So strange. You see these movies where people apologize in the end and you think there's no way that it will ever happen in life, but it did happen. And he was saying this phrase, "I owe you one, I owe you one," which was so confusing to me. But it was soothing. But I think, still, I had to go over it in my mind again. And the real resolution for me came more in writing the book — even more than our last conversation.

  Bo Hamby, Emily Ochsenschlager and Jessica Smith produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Patrick Jarenwattananon adapted it for the Web.

• NY Times - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/books/steve-jobs-lisa-brennan-jobs-small-fry.html

  QUOTED: "Have I failed? ... Have I failed in fully representing the dearness and the pleasure? The dearness of my father, and the outrageous pleasure of being with him when he was in good form?"
  "When I started writing ... I didn’t think he’d be so interesting on the page, and I was almost frustrated that he pulled so much gravity."
  "I see my husband and the way he is with his daughters—responsive and alive and sensitive in ways my father would have liked to be. ... My father would have loved to be a man like that, and he surrounded himself with men like that, but he couldn’t be."

  In ‘Small Fry,’ Steve Jobs Comes Across as a Jerk. His Daughter Forgives Him. Should We?
  Lisa Brennan-Jobs has written a memoir about her famous father. The details are damning, but she doesn’t want them to be.
  What Lisa Brennan-Jobs wants readers to know is this: Steve Jobs rejected his daughter for years, but that daughter has absolved him.CreditCreditFrances F. Denny for The New York Times
  By Nellie Bowles
  Aug. 23, 2018

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  When Steve Jobs told his daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs that the Apple Lisa computer was not named after her, it was not a cruel lie to a little girl, she insists — he was teaching her “not to ride on his coattails.”

  When Mr. Jobs refused to install heat in her bedroom, he was not being callous, she says — he was instilling in her a “value system.”

  When a dying Mr. Jobs told Ms. Brennan-Jobs that she smelled “like a toilet,” it was not a hateful snipe, she maintains — he was merely showing her “honesty.”

  It’s a strange thing to write a devastating memoir with damning details but demand that these things are not, in fact, damning at all. Yet that’s exactly what Ms. Brennan-Jobs has done in a new memoir, “Small Fry,” and in a series of interviews conducted over the last few weeks.
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  Thanks to a dozen other biographies and films, Apple obsessives already know the broad outlines of Ms. Brennan-Jobs’s early life: Mr. Jobs fathered her at 23, then denied paternity despite a DNA match, and gave little in financial or emotional support even as he became a god of the early computing era. “Small Fry,” which goes on sale Sept. 4, is Ms. Brennan-Jobs’s effort to reclaim her story for herself.

  The backdrop to her raw depictions of life with and without Mr. Jobs is 1980s Silicon Valley, where artists and hippies mixed with technologists, ideas of how to build the future flourished, and a cascade of trillions of dollars was just beginning to crash onto the landscape. Ms. Brennan-Jobs navigated a childhood on welfare with her mother, the artist Chrisann Brennan, and an adolescence ensconced in her father’s wealth.

  In passage after passage of “Small Fry,” Mr. Jobs is vicious to his daughter and those around her. Now, in the days before the book is released, Ms. Brennan-Jobs is fearful that it will be received as a tell-all exposé, and not the more nuanced portrait of a family she intended. She worries that the reaction will be about a famous man’s legacy rather than a young woman’s story — that she will be erased again, this time in her own memoir.

  On the eve of publication, what Ms. Brennan-Jobs wants readers to know is this: Steve Jobs rejected his daughter for years, but that daughter has absolved him. Triumphantly, she loves him, and she wants the book’s scenes of their roller skating and laughing together to be as viral as the scenes of him telling her she will inherit nothing.

  Ms. Brennan-Jobs’s forgiveness is one thing. What’s tricky is that she wants the reader to forgive Mr. Jobs, too. And she knows that could be a problem.
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  “Have I failed?” she asked, in one of our conversations. “Have I failed in fully representing the dearness and the pleasure? The dearness of my father, and the outrageous pleasure of being with him when he was in good form?”

  ‘The Bad Part of a Great Story’

  After college, Ms. Brennan-Jobs left the United States to work in finance in London and Italy; she later shifted into design, and then freelance writing for magazines and literary journals. Now 40, she has long avoided publicity. She has never been profiled, and she has carefully eluded most of her father’s chroniclers. (One exception: Aaron Sorkin, who called her “the heroine” of his 2015 Steve Jobs biopic.) Ms. Brennan-Jobs said she did not trust Walter Isaacson, who wrote the definitive, megaselling biography of her father in 2011.

  “I never spoke with Walter, and I never read the book, but I know I came off as cold to my father and not caring whether he felt bad,” Ms. Brennan-Jobs said in late July, sitting in Cantine, a small, vegan-friendly cafe in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood. “I was devastated by it.”
  Image
  “Small Fry” goes on sale Sept. 4.CreditPatricia Wall/The New York Times
  “I felt ashamed to be the bad part of a great story,” she continued. “And I felt unresolved.”

  And so in “Small Fry,” she seeks to resolve some of that shame by describing how her childhood unfolded, who key characters were, why it all happened. Ms. Brennan-Jobs went back to Silicon Valley and interviewed her family, her friends, her mother’s ex-boyfriends, and her father’s ex-girlfriend. In her childhood, the region had been green with eucalyptus and full of garage hackers. Now it is the greatest wealth-creation machine in the history of the world, and Mr. Jobs remains its towering hero.

  Ms. Brennan-Jobs began work on what would become “Small Fry” not long after her father’s 2011 death. Years into writing, she felt rushed by her publisher, Penguin Press, and feared being “tarted up” and made to take advantage of her father’s legacy. She wanted to be with a smaller publisher who would work with her and give her more time, and switched to Grove, taking what she says was a 90 percent cut in her advance. (A spokesperson for Penguin declined to comment.)

  One result of the delay is that “Small Fry” is entering the public conversation at a time when, across industries, formerly disempowered or ignored women are having their say about powerful men. A memoir by Steve Jobs’s firstborn was always going to be a publishing sensation, but Ms. Brennan-Jobs has inadvertently timed hers to land when the public is even more attuned to marginalized voices — and when many are having darker thoughts about the world Mr. Jobs created with his attention-devouring devices.
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  ‘I Hope Thanksgiving’s OK’

  None of that, of course, was imaginable when Ms. Brennan-Jobs was born on May 17, 1978, on a commune farm in Oregon. Her parents, who had met in high school in Cupertino, Calif., were both 23. Mr. Jobs arrived days after the birth and helped name her, but refused to acknowledge that he was the father. To support her family, Ms. Brennan cleaned houses and used government assistance. Only after the government sued Mr. Jobs did he agree to pay child support.

  “Small Fry” describes how Mr. Jobs slowly took a greater interest in his daughter, taking her skating and coming over to her house for visits. Ms. Brennan-Jobs moved in with him for a time during high school, when her mother was struggling with money and her temper, but Mr. Jobs was cold and had extreme demands for what being a member of the family entailed. The neighbors next door worried about the teenage Lisa, and one night, when Mr. Jobs was out, they moved her from his house and into theirs. Against Mr. Jobs’s wishes, the neighbors paid for her to finish college. (He later paid them back.)

  In an interview, Ms. Brennan-Jobs spoke of “not wanting to alienate people” she loves, but acknowledged that her memoir might do just that. Aside from Mr. Jobs, all the central characters are very much alive. “I hope Thanksgiving’s O.K.,” she said.

  Her mother, Ms. Brennan, is portrayed as a free spirit who nurtured her daughter’s creativity — but could be mercurial, hot-tempered and sometimes neglectful. “It was horrendous for me to read,” Ms. Brennan said in an interview. “It was very, very hard. But she got it right.”

  Mr. Jobs’s infamous venom is on frequent display in “Small Fry.” Out one night at dinner, Mr. Jobs turns to his daughter’s cousin, Sarah, who has just unknowingly offended him by ordering meat. “‘Have you ever thought about how awful your voice is?” Mr. Jobs asks Sarah. “Please stop talking in that awful voice,” he says, adding, “You should really consider what’s wrong with yourself and try to fix it.”

  Ms. Brennan-Jobs describes her father’s frequent use of money to confuse or frighten her. “Sometimes he decided not to pay for things at the very last minute,” she writes, “walking out of restaurants without paying the bill.” When her mother found a beautiful house and asked Mr. Jobs to buy it for her and Lisa, he agreed it was nice — but bought it for himself and moved in with his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs.

  Ms. Brennan said that her daughter has, if anything, underplayed the chaos of her childhood. “She didn’t go into how bad it really was, if you can believe that,” she said.
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  But “Small Fry” also contains moments of joy that capture Mr. Jobs’s spontaneity and unparalleled mind. When Ms. Brennan-Jobs goes on a school trip to Japan, he arrives unannounced and pulls her out of the program for a day. Father and daughter sit, talking about God and how he sees consciousness. “I was afraid of him and, at the same time, I felt a quaking, electric love,” she writes.

  “When I started writing,” Ms. Brennan-Jobs told me, “I didn’t think he’d be so interesting on the page, and I was almost frustrated that he pulled so much gravity.”

  COMMENT OF THE MOMENT
  Biscuit commented August 24
  B
  Biscuit
  Santa Barbara, CAAug. 24
  Times Pick
  The heading asks if we, who never knew Steve Jobs, can "forgive" him. I haven't yet read the book but have never pondered celebrating or denigrating him as a father. Life is complicated. To parent is to make mistakes--nobody does it perfectly;.it sounds as though his heart was in the right place. Lisa Brennan-Jobs loves her father, who, like the rest of us, was human.
  77 RecommendShareFlag
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  After Ms. Brennan-Jobs moved in with Mr. Jobs as a teenager, he forbade her from seeing her mother for six months, as a way to cement her connection to his new family. At the same time, Mr. Jobs shifted from neglectful to controlling. When Ms. Brennan-Jobs was getting increasingly involved at her high school, starting an opera club and running for freshman-class president, he got upset. “This isn’t working out. You’re not succeeding as a member of this family,” Mr. Jobs says in the memoir. “You’re never around. If you want to be a part of this family, you need to put in the time.”
  Image

  Lisa Brennan-Jobs with her father, Steve Jobs, in the early 1980s, playing around on a trampoline.
  CreditLisa Brennan-Jobs
  To appease her father, Ms. Brennan-Jobs transferred to another school that was closer to her father’s house. She persisted in becoming editor in chief of the school newspaper. Her mentor there, a journalism teacher named Esther Wojcicki, says “Small Fry” is a faithful account.

  “The dialogue that she had in there between her and Steve was just exactly right,” Ms. Wojcicki said. “The book is a gift to all of us.”

  Early copies of the memoir have circulated among family and friends. Ms. Powell Jobs, her children and Mr. Jobs’s sister, Mona Simpson, gave this statement to The Times: “Lisa is part of our family, so it was with sadness that we read her book, which differs dramatically from our memories of those times. The portrayal of Steve is not the husband and father we knew. Steve loved Lisa, and he regretted that he was not the father he should have been during her early childhood. It was a great comfort to Steve to have Lisa home with all of us during the last days of his life, and we are all grateful for the years we spent together as a family.”
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  Set Free

  On a hot August day in Brooklyn, Ms. Brennan-Jobs and I walked to her studio, a small apartment with brick walls she painted white and a bamboo floor she painted black. While writing “Small Fry,” she told me, she covered the mirrors around her work space with paper. “I don’t like catching myself in the mirror,” she said, “because it’s like — ‘Oh, self.’”

  Ms. Brennan-Jobs said she was nervous about how she would be described physically in a profile, and so I asked her to use her own words. “My face is uneven,” she said. “I have small eyes. I wish I had dimples, but I don’t. I think right now I look jowly.”

  I interjected to say she had delicate features, and freckles, and was about 5 foot 2, with slightly reddish brown hair.

  “My nose,” Ms. Brennan-Jobs replied, “is not particularly delicate.”

  She is deeply self-deprecating, saying she was horrified to be doing “a celebrity memoir.” She said she was sure The New Yorker would not review the book, and that years ago, her first meeting at Grove only occurred because Elisabeth Schmitz, the editorial director, was doing a favor for a mutual friend.

  “My first thought on being pitched the book was, ‘I don’t do this kind of thing. I don’t know how to publish a celebrity memoir,’” said Ms. Schmitz, who has acquired literary memoirs like the naturalist Helen Macdonald’s “H is for Hawk.” But something about Ms. Brennan-Jobs’s writing made her reconsider. “From the first page,” she said, “her language is fresh, surprising, unpredictable.”

  I’ve read it, and her writing really is compelling. Ms. Brennan-Jobs takes the same linguistic knife to herself as she does to others. She writes with disgust about using anecdotes from her childhood to elicit sympathy from others, and she is ashamed to have dropped her father’s name during an interview to get into Harvard.

  On Aug. 1, Vanity Fair published an excerpt from “Small Fry” under the digital headline “I Have a Secret. My Father Is Steve Jobs.” A few nights later, Ms. Brennan-Jobs called me, worried. She hated the title, and on social media, readers were feasting on the more savage details of her account — especially the “toilet” comment.
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  “He was telling me the truth,” Ms. Brennan-Jobs told me, adding that the rosewater perfume she wore had turned. “I wasn’t aware of it. Sometimes it’s nice of someone to tell you what you smell like.”

  It was another uncomfortable reminder that even though “Small Fry” is Ms. Brennan-Jobs’s story — one written in a precise, literary style — her father’s myth looms so large that she cannot control how her words are received. When choosing a narrator for the audio version, she nixed the ones who spoke his lines too harshly or without humor.

  So much of Ms. Brennan-Jobs’s effort with the memoir seems to be to show how brutal Steve Jobs could be — and, in doing so, to reclaim that brutality for herself. And how she wants to reclaim it is to love it.
  Image

  If anything, Lisa Brennan-Jobs has underplayed the chaos of her childhood in this memoir, said Chrisann Brennan, seen here with Lisa in an early 1990s photo.Creditvia Lisa Brennan-Jobs
  “You get your inheritance, delivered in a lump of coal or whatever in a sort of awful package,” she told me at one point. “And you have to take a lot of time to turn the awful package on its head, and it reveals something kind of glorious, and then you’re set free.”

  Inappropriate Scenes

  If Ms. Brennan-Jobs was alarmed by the reaction to the toilet-water excerpt, she may be unprepared for what happens when readers encounter more disturbing material. Several times in “Small Fry,” Mr. Jobs engages in what seems like inappropriate affection in front of his daughter.

  Ms. Brennan-Jobs describes him embracing Ms. Powell Jobs one day, “pulling her in to a kiss, moving his hand closer to her breasts,” and up her thigh, “moaning theatrically.”
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  When Ms. Brennan-Jobs tries to leave, her father stops her: “‘Hey Lis,’ he said. ‘Stay here. We’re having a family moment. It’s important that you try to be part of this family.’ I sat still, looking away as he moaned and undulated.”

  Ms. Brennan-Jobs emphasized in an interview that she never felt threatened by her father, and that to her, these scenes show he was “just awkward.”

  This kind of display was not an isolated incident, said Ms. Brennan-Jobs’ mother, who described an upsetting, sexualized conversation between Mr. Jobs and their daughter in her 2013 memoir, “A Bite in the Apple.” One evening, Ms. Brennan writes, she let Mr. Jobs babysit 9-year-old Lisa. When Ms. Brennan came home early, she found Mr. Jobs with the girl, “teasing her nonstop about her sexual aspirations,” “ridiculing her with sexual innuendos,” and “joking about bedroom antics between Lisa and this or that guy.”

  Ms. Brennan, in her memoir, describes feeling scared for her daughter that night, and wanting to place her body between them and get out of there. “I will be clear,” Ms. Brennan writes. “Steve was not a sexual predator of children. There was something else going on.” Still, after that night, Ms. Brennan tried to make sure there was “a chaperone” when Mr. Jobs was with his young daughter for long hours, she told me recently.

  “He was so inappropriate because he didn’t know how to do better,” Ms. Brennan said. In her book, she characterizes Mr. Jobs as “on a slide whistle between human and inhuman.”

  One afternoon in August, as Ms. Brennan-Jobs and I talked in her kitchen, she made a juice of dandelion greens, pineapple, turmeric and ginger roots. She eats an extremely healthy diet and knows it mirrors her father’s, which veered into esoteric California wellness trends, even as pancreatic cancer took over more of his body.

  Ms. Brennan-Jobs has a husband, Bill, a longtime Microsoft employee now launching a software start-up. He has two daughters, aged 10 and 12, and he and Ms. Brennan-Jobs have a 4-month-old son. As she drinks her juice, Bill is nearby with the children, and there’s an easygoing energy in the house.
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  “I see my husband and the way he is with his daughters — responsive and alive and sensitive in ways my father would have liked to be,” Ms. Brennan-Jobs said. “My father would have loved to be a man like that, and he surrounded himself with men like that, but he couldn’t be.”

  Decades after his child-support lawsuit, Mr. Jobs erased his paternity again. “Small Fry” notes that on his corporate bio on the Apple website, the detail-obsessed chief executive was listed as having three children. But of course he had four.

  ‘We’re Just Cold People’

  The most public torchbearer for Mr. Jobs’s character and legacy is Ms. Powell Jobs. With an inherited fortune of some $21 billion, she has engaged in philanthropy and launched the Emerson Collective, an organization that pursues liberal political activism and for-profit investments, and owns a majority stake in the Atlantic magazine.
  Image

  Three-year-old Lisa Brennan-Jobs with her mother, Chrisann Brennan, in Saratoga, Calif.CreditLisa Brennan-Jobs
  Ms. Powell Jobs plays a somewhat “tonic note” in “Small Fry,” Ms. Brennan-Jobs said. Her stepmother brings her into family photos, for example, but many of the descriptions of Ms. Powell Jobs are biting.

  Ms. Brennan-Jobs told me that she gave Ms. Powell Jobs “the best line” in the book. It appears in a scene where Ms. Powell Jobs and Mr. Jobs go to a therapy session with a teenage Lisa. Ms. Brennan-Jobs cries and says she feels lonely and has wanted her parents to say good night to her.

  Ms. Powell Jobs responds to the therapist: “We’re just cold people.”

  Toward the end of Mr. Jobs’s life, he finally apologized to his daughter. Ms. Brennan-Jobs calls it her “movie ending.” In the book, she writes that Mr. Jobs said he was sorry he had not spent more time with her, and for disappearing during her adulthood, forgetting birthdays and not returning notes or calls.
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  In reply, Ms. Brennan-Jobs says she knows he was busy. Mr. Jobs answers that he acted the way he did because she had offended him. “It wasn’t because I was busy. It was because I was mad you didn’t invite me to the Harvard weekend,” he says in the book, referring to a matriculation event.

  He also cries and tells her over and over again, “I owe you one” — a famously articulate communicator unable to summon the basic language of contrition.

  Ms. Brennan-Jobs may be experiencing a kind of author’s remorse as her book makes its way toward store shelves. But details as lethal as these — they sink into Mr. Jobs’s legend like daggers to the hilt — are more proof than any DNA test that she is her father’s daughter.

  Ultimately, Mr. Jobs left his daughter an inheritance in the millions — the same amount as his other children — and she is not involved in the allocation of his financial legacy. If she was in charge of his billions, she says, she would give it away to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — a curious twist given her father’s epic rivalry with Apple’s archnemesis.

  “Would it be too perverse?” she asked. “I feel like the Gates Foundation is really doing good stuff, and I think I would just hot potato it away.”

  Ms. Brennan-Jobs said she wrote “Small Fry” in part to figure out why he withheld money from her even as his wealth ballooned, and as he spent it more freely on the children he had with Ms. Powell Jobs. She said she now sees it was about teaching her that money can corrupt.

  The ethos “felt true and kind of beautiful and kind of enlightened for somebody like that,” she said. Still, the question was “why he would have taken that value system and applied it so severely to me.”
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  “You can have a value system and be unable to totally live it,” she added. “And you can imagine being that rich and famous and how amazing it is if you can hold on to some of your value system. He didn’t do it right. He didn’t apply it evenly. But I feel grateful for it.”

  Ms. Brennan-Jobs told me she likes toying with the strange power of being a memoirist writing about trauma because the reader knows she made it out O.K. She is here in the privileged position of writing this book, after all. And as a memoirist, even a reluctant one, she gets the final word.

  One night toward the end of Mr. Jobs’s life — and the end of the book — he is watching “Law and Order” in bed.

  “‘Are you going to write about me?’” he asks her.

  She tells him no.

  “‘Good,’ he says, and turns back to the television.”

QUOTED: "This is not a tell-all; it's an exquisitely rendered story of family, love, and identity. Brennan-Jobs benefits from her father's story, but her prose doesn't require his spotlight to shine."

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Print Marked Items
Brennan-Jobs, Lisa: SMALL FRY
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 15, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Brennan-Jobs, Lisa SMALL FRY Grove (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 9, 4 ISBN: 978-0-8021-2823-2
An epic, sharp coming-of-age story from the daughter of Steve Jobs.
It's rare to find a memoir from a celebrity's child in which the writing is equal to--or exceeds--the parent's
reputation, but that is the case with Brennan-Jobs' debut. The author engagingly packs in every detail of her
life, including her seemingly innocuous conception by Jobs and artist Chrisann Brennan, her father's
paternity denial, their rocky reconciliation, and Jobs' ultimate rejection and silence. In a lesser writer's
hands, the narrative could have devolved into literary revenge. Instead, Brennan-Jobs offers a stunningly
beautiful study of parenting that just so happens to include the co-founder of Apple. With a background in
journalism, she skillfully and poignantly navigates her formative years, revealing the emotional wounds that
parents can often visit upon their children. From Jobs' refusal to pay for her college to his ongoing
refutation that his first personal computer, the Apple Lisa, was named for her, she describes a master of
mental and emotional manipulation: " 'Well, then, who was it named after?' 'An old girlfriend,' he said,
looking off into the distance, as if remembering. Wistful. It was this dreamy quality that made me believe he
was telling the truth, because otherwise it was quite an act....I had a strange feeling in my stomach...[and
was] starting to believe I was calibrated wrong." Not until Jobs was on his deathbed did he finally admit to
his daughter that the Apple Lisa was named after her. But why lie? Why purposely hurt your child and then,
a moment later, display enormous affection? Those are some of the questions the author wrestles with as she
examines her youth. Of course, the book also includes enough celebrity gossip to please tabloid lovers, but
this is not a tell-all; it's an exquisitely rendered story of family, love, and identity.
Brennan-Jobs benefits from her father's story, but her prose doesn't require his spotlight to shine.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Brennan-Jobs, Lisa: SMALL FRY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2018. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543008933/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ac3b515a.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A543008933

QUOTED: "It is a testament to her fine writing and journalistic approach that her
memoir never turns maudlin or gossipy."

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Small Fry
Kathy Sexton
Booklist.
114.22 (Aug. 1, 2018): p17.
COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Small Fry.
By Lisa Brennan-Jobs.
Sept. 2018. 400p. Grove, $26 (9780802128232). 818.
When artist Chrisann Brennan told her on-again, off-again partner, Apple founder Steve Jobs, that she was
pregnant with his child, he literally ran away. When the baby, who would become this books author, was
born, Jobs reappeared for just long enough to name her Lisa. After first publicly denying paternity (even
after a DNA test) and being forced to pay child support, Jobs becomes a sporadic, enigmatic, and powerful
presence in the author's young life. While Brennan is loving and affectionate as she struggles to provide a
stable home, Jobs is awkward and distant, even as he and Brennan-Jobs become closer. The author's
youthful longing for her father's approval drives this memoir. Though Jobs' rejections, from denying he
named one of the first Apple computers after the author (he did) to telling her how stupid debate is after she
wins a competition, can be difficult to read, Brennan-Jobs skillfully relays her past without judgement,
staying true to her younger self. It is a testament to her fine writing and journalistic approach that her
memoir never turns maudlin or gossipy. Rather than a celebrity biography, this is Brennan-Jobs' authentic
story of growing up in two very different environments, neither of which felt quite like home.--Kathy
Sexton
YA: Older teens who appreciate non-traditional family stories and those who are navigating dual
households themselves might identify with Brennan-Jobs' teen perspective. KS.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Sexton, Kathy. "Small Fry." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2018, p. 17. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A550613075/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=d8007f38.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A550613075

QUOTED: "incisive debut memoir."
"This sincere and disquieting portrait reveals a complex father-daughter relationship."

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Small Fry: A Memoir
Publishers Weekly.
265.24 (June 11, 2018): p56.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Small Fry: A Memoir
Lisa Brennan-Jobs. Grove, $26 (400p)
ISBN 978-0-8021-2823-2
In her incisive debut memoir, writer Brennan-Jobs explores her upbringing as the daughter of Apple
founder Steve Jobs and Chrisann Brennan, an artist and writer (the couple never married). The book opens
with Jobs's deteriorating health from cancer, but the author quickly backtracks to her early childhood, filling
in details of her birth (including Jobs's initial denial of paternity, a claim debunked through DNA testing).
Brennan-Jobs's narrative is tinged with awe, yearning, and disappointment. Initially, Brennan-Jobs lived
with her mother, who supplemented welfare with waitressing and cleaning houses. In time, Jobs became
interested in his daughter, and in high school Brennan-Jobs lived with him, becoming the go-to babysitter
for his son with his wife, Laurene Powell. Later, when Brennan-Jobs declined a family trip to the circus,
Jobs, citing family disloyalty, asked her to move out and stopped payment on her Harvard tuition (a kindly
friend offered aid, which Jobs later repaid). Bringing the reader into the heart of the child who admired
Jobs's genius, craved his love, and feared his unpredictability, Brennan-Jobs writes lucidly of happy times,
as well as of her loneliness in Jobs's spacious home where he refuses to bid her good-night. On his
deathbed, his apology for the past soothes, she writes, "like cool water on a burn." This sincere and
disquieting portrait reveals a complex father-daughter relationship. Agent: David McCormick, McCormick
Literary. (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Small Fry: A Memoir." Publishers Weekly, 11 June 2018, p. 56. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542967347/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=719cb80d.
Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A542967347
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Lisa Brennan-Jobs's Memoir Is the
Sleeper Critical Hit of the Season
Vulture.
(Sept. 6, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 New York Media
http://www.vulture.com/
Full Text:
Byline: Hillary Kelly
Steve Jobs's official bio for Apple left out his oldest daughter, Lisa, who was born to a former girlfriend on
a farm in 1978. It was no accident. Jobs famously lacked what Jennifer Aniston would have referred to as
his "sensitivity chip." He refused to acknowledge Lisa for years - her mother "supplemented her welfare
payments by cleaning houses and waitressing" - then demanded paternity tests. Four days after finally
accepting the results and agreeing to $385 a month in child support, he took Apple public, "and overnight,"
she writes in the memoir, "my father was worth more than $200 million."
If he was anybody else we'd call him a deadbeat dad, but because he was his holiness Steve Jobs, his
reputation as the patron saint of handheld technology remained intact.
That facade began to crumble in the wake of Walter Isaacson's 2011 biography (and Aaron Sorkin's
ambivalent adaptation four years later). But this week, Lisa Brennan-Jobs herself demolished it. Her
memoir, Small Fry, the sleeper critical hit of the season, has been excerpted in Vanity Fair. Its author,
profiled by both the New York Times and the Guardian, details the B.A.N.A.N.A.S. neglect and
maltreatment she suffered at the hands of her father. And contra Sorkin's movie, there was no full
reconciliation. On his deathbed, a time when many fathers would be revelling in the beauty of the life they
had created, Jobs told his daughter that she "smelled like a toilet."
The book is ubiquitous - covered by (https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a22896268/trump-steve-jobdaughter-memoir/)
Esquire, (http://time.com/5385383/lisa-brennan-jobs-small-fry-apple/) Time, and of
course, (https://people.com/human-interest/steve-jobs-daughter-apple-trillion-dollar/) People. Reviewers of
a less literary bent have latched onto the details of callousness oozing out of the memoir, as you might
expect, and turned a firehose of empathy on Brennan-Jobs.
(https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2018/09/04/what-we-learn-steve-jobs-cruelty-kindnessdaughter-lisa-brennan-jobs-memoir-small-fy/1085178002/)
USA Today proclaimed that "there's no way to
read [Small Fry] and not feel complete sympathy and sadness." (https://www.businessinsider.com/stevejobs-terrible-small-fry-daughter-book-2018-8)
Business Insider argued that "what she endured was
something many people would now consider child abuse." (It really says something when part of a book
review's URL reads, "steve-jobs-terrible.") On the (https://www.today.com/video/lisa-brennan-jobs-on-dadsteve-jobs-i-wish-we-had-more-time-1313223235567?v=railb&)
Today show this morning - a massive
platform not generally available to debut authors - Hoda Kotb could not stop herself from pressing
Brennan-Jobs repeatedly about her father's heartlessness. Brennan-Jobs tried repeatedly to refocus the
interview on how the book is really "a coming-of-age story" which is "easy to forget because there's the
distraction of this famous person."
That's been her strange role over the past few weeks - defender of the man whom she lays bare as a jerk and
a potential emotional abuser. Even before the book was released on Tuesday, Brennan-Jobs was so fretful
about the anticipated publicity that her anxiety about "fully representing the dearness of my father, and the
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outrageous pleasure of being with him when he was in good form" became the focus of a
(https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/23/books/steve-jobs-lisa-brennan-jobs-small-fry.html?
action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage) New York Times profile.
And yet, every reviewer who's engaged with the writing itself has nothing but heaps of praise for it.
(https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/lisa-brennan-jobs/small-fry-brennan-jobs/) Kirkus, in the
prepublication review that often sets the tone for all criticism to come, said: "It's rare to find a memoir from
a celebrity's child in which the writing is equal to - or exceeds - the parent's reputation, but that is the case
with Brennan-Jobs' debut. In a lesser writer's hands, the narrative could have devolved into literary revenge.
Instead, Brennan-Jobs offers a stunningly beautiful study of parenting that just so happens to include the cofounder
of Apple."
Vogue has included Small Fry in its (https://www.vogue.com/article/best-new-books-fall-2018) roundup of
the best books coming out this fall, calling it "a book that upends expectations, delivering a masterly Silicon
Valley gothic."
"Before I read her book," wrote Melanie Thernstrom for The New York Times Book Review, "I wondered if
it had been ghostwritten, like many such books [but] - Her inner landscape is depicted in such exquisitely
granular detail that it feels as if no one else could possibly have written it. Indeed, it has that defining aspect
of a literary work: the stamp of a singular sensibility. In the fallen world of kiss-and-tell celebrity memoirs,
this may be the most beautiful, literary and devastating one ever written."
We shouldn't be surprised. Not only does Brennan-Jobs have an MFA from Bennington (and a novelist aunt,
Mona Simpson), but she's also the daughter of the man who sold America a trillion-dollar story.
To access, purchase, authenticate, or subscribe to the full-text of this article, please visit this link:
http://www.vulture.com/2018/09/lisa-brennan-jobss-memoir-small-fry-a-review-roundup.html?
utm_source=nym&utm_medium=f1&utm_campaign=feed-full
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Lisa Brennan-Jobs's Memoir Is the Sleeper Critical Hit of the Season." Vulture, 6 Sept. 2018. General
OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A553158977/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=dce85a3c. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A553158977

"Brennan-Jobs, Lisa: SMALL FRY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A543008933/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018. Sexton, Kathy. "Small Fry." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2018, p. 17. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A550613075/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018. "Small Fry: A Memoir." Publishers Weekly, 11 June 2018, p. 56. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A542967347/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018. "Lisa Brennan-Jobs's Memoir Is the Sleeper Critical Hit of the Season." Vulture, 6 Sept. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A553158977/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF. Accessed 30 Sept. 2018.

• New Yorker
  https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/small-fry-reviewed-lisa-brennan-jobss-mesmerizing-discomfiting-memoir
  Word count: 1419

  QUOTED: "Small Fry, a book of no small literary skill, is confused and conflicted, angry and desperate to forgive. Its central, compelling puzzle is Brennan-Jobs’s continuing need to justify not just her father’s behavior but her longing for his love. It is a mesmerizing, discomfiting reading."
  "Some autobiographies double as acts of self-assertion, opportunities for the author not only to express her side of the story but also to display forgiveness, resilience, strength. But Brennan-Jobs’s book seems more wounded than triumphant; it can feel like artfully sculpted scar tissue."
  "Brennan-Jobs’s introspection has a frantic edge, as if she were still the seven-year-old girl who’d shown up to school in a too-thin dress and tried to distract her friends by spinning."

  “Small Fry,” Reviewed: Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s Mesmerizing, Discomfiting Memoir
  By Katy WaldmanSeptember 6, 2018

  In “Small Fry,” Lisa Brennan-Jobs, Steve Jobs’s oldest child, seeks control of part of her father’s myth. The drama has almost inevitably unfolded in ways that reinscribe his power.Photograph by Ed Kashi / VII / Redux
  In her new memoir, “Small Fry,” Lisa Brennan-Jobs, one of Steve Jobs’s daughters, stresses how she relished the company of the Apple co-founder. She makes much of their sporadic roller-skating expeditions, and of the time he surprised her by crashing her class field trip to Japan. In a recent Times profile, she worried aloud that her book doesn’t do enough to capture Jobs’s one-of-a-kind fatherliness. “Have I failed in fully representing the dearness and the pleasure?” she asked. “The dearness of my father, and the outrageous pleasure of being with him when he was in good form?”

  To answer: yes, she does fail, if rendering Jobs as dear and pleasurable were ever really her aim. Steve Jobs was a man of many foibles, in ways we’ve long known about and in ways that are newly revealed in this book. He denied his paternity of Lisa until he was sued for child-support payments. He was, Brennan-Jobs alleges, a wellspring of sexually inappropriate comments. (She says that he wondered aloud at the breakfast table whether his daughter would grow up to look like Brooke Shields. “It gave me a strange feeling when he talked of the beauty of other women,” she recalls, “the longing in his voice when he talked of blonde hair or of breasts, gesturing weights in his cupped hands.”) She claims that he ignored her and kicked her out of family portraits. She spent her childhood ping-ponging between her mom’s place (Chrisann Brennan lived for stretches on welfare benefits) and her dad’s mansions: cavernous, barely furnished, with unused swimming pools and empty aviaries. (“A friend gave me a peacock once,” Steve tells Lisa, “but it wandered off.”) Brennan-Jobs admires her father’s brilliance and charisma, but her memoir elicits little sympathy for him, and “Small Fry,” a book of no small literary skill, is confused and conflicted, angry and desperate to forgive. Its central, compelling puzzle is Brennan-Jobs’s continuing need to justify not just her father’s behavior but her longing for his love. It is a mesmerizing, discomfiting reading.

  Brennan-Jobs’s attempt to take control of some modest part of the Steve Jobs myth has almost inevitably unfolded in ways that reinscribe his power, both over his family and a reverent public. Laurene Powell Jobs, his widow, and Mona Simpson, his sister, released a statement rejecting Brennan-Jobs’s account: her “portrayal of Steve is not the husband and father we knew,” they wrote. (Simpson’s co-signing of the statement completes a reversal: Brennan-Jobs says that she reeled with hurt when her aunt published the novel “A Regular Guy,” a thinly veiled lampoon of Jobs that featured a highly sympathetic Lisa stand-in.) The statement’s appeal to family loyalty, to closing ranks, underscores what is implicit throughout this memoir: the tantalizing possibility that Jobs’s cruelties also manifested his love. Nowhere is this clearer in “Small Fry” than in the faux mystery of the namesake of the Apple Lisa computer: he names one of his early masterpieces after his daughter, but denies it and denies it again; when he finally acknowledges the obvious, Lisa is twenty-seven, and he doesn’t admit it to her directly—he admits it to Bono, whose villa they are visiting in the South of France.

  The book is as attentive to the women united and set at odds by their dependence on Jobs as it is to Jobs himself. “Small Fry” begins as a study of the relationship between Lisa and Chrisann, a tornado who cherishes her daughter but resents their difficult life; Steve is more an aching absence and a whiff of celebrity than a character. By the time Lisa is in middle school, Chrisann and Lisa’s fights grow so intense that Lisa moves in with her father and his new wife. Laurene, Brennan-Jobs writes, likes to call people “losers,” forming an L shape with her thumb and index finger. Laurene and Steve sometimes make out in front of Lisa, “moaning theatrically, as if for an audience.” When Lisa cries during a family therapy appointment, Laurene is impassive, saying, “We’re just cold people.” But Brennan-Jobs insists that she found her stepmother infuriating “because of the immensity of the job I had in mind for her. . . . I hoped she would fix our family, pry my father open, demand his full heart and attention and get him to acknowledge what he’d missed.” This is an admission of guilt—the mature Lisa accepts responsibility for the ways that her stepmother hurt and alienated her, which were caused by her own unreasonable expectations for the adults who had power over her. The near-apology sits uneasily alongside passages that trace the contortions she put herself through as a teen-ager: “I was unsure of my position in the house, and this anxiety—combined with a feeling of immense gratitude so overwhelming I thought I might burst—caused me to talk too much, compliment too much, to say yes to whatever they asked, hoping my servile quality would ignite compassion, pity, or love.”

  Some autobiographies double as acts of self-assertion, opportunities for the author not only to express her side of the story but also to display forgiveness, resilience, strength. But Brennan-Jobs’s book seems more wounded than triumphant; it can feel like artfully sculpted scar tissue. Strafed by repeated rejections, the young Lisa retreats into “another magical identity, an extra thing that started to itch and tingle when I felt small.” In “Small Fry,” there is a slippage between the two Lisas, a beguiling loss of distinction between the work of juvenile self-building and the work of memoir. The book often reads as a chronicle of pain, and of compensatory strategies—when her father mistreats her, Brennan-Jobs charms him, or appeases him, or lashes out. These dual conflicts with her parent and within herself often materialize in the text as surreal flights of passive aggression—she carefully itemizes offenses against her and then pointedly refuses to condemn them. When Chrisann asks Steve to buy a house for Lisa and herself and he buys it for his new girlfriend instead, Lisa affects feeling shame about her own hubris. Brennan-Jobs’s introspection has a frantic edge, as if she were still the seven-year-old girl who’d shown up to school in a too-thin dress and tried to distract her friends by spinning. “I kept twirling fast,” she recalls. “If I stopped, everyone would see that I was almost naked.” There is another assumption here, one that was conditioned by a difficult upbringing and that is inherent in publishing a memoir, no matter who you are: that everyone is watching and harshly judging.

  Jobs eventually judges himself. He even apologizes. “I wish I could go back,” he sobs, stricken by cancer. “I wish I could change it.” His adult child writes in response that she grieves “our missed chance at friendship,” and the tender scene ends. Brennan-Jobs appears on the cover of her book as a girl’s outline, filled with flowers. The graphic promises regeneration and completion. The man who stares out from the famous Walter Isaacson biography is fierce, expectant. The photograph is so iconic that it looks like an iteration of itself, one of many billboards on a road with no off-ramp.

  Katy Waldman is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

• Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/13/small-fry-lisa-brennan-jobs-review-steve-jobs
  Word count: 1108

  QUOTED: "Hers is, of course, a one-sided account, one that has been backed by her mother but staunchly rejected by her stepmother and her aunt, the writer Mona Simpson. In memoirs, as in life, one person’s fact is often another’s fiction. Brennan-Jobs doesn’t emerge smelling of roses either."
  "Her father has rarely been portrayed as a saint but Small Fry reveals him as a man capable of startling selfishness and cruelty to those closest to him. Given all she endured, who could begrudge his daughter the last word?"

  Small Fry by Lisa Brennan-Jobs – growing up as Steve Jobs’s daughter
  The Apple founder’s daughter has the last word in a memoir detailing years of neglect and controlling behaviour

  Lisa Brennan-Jobs interview: ‘Clearly I was not compelling enough for my father’
  Fiona Sturges

  Thu 13 Sep 2018 07.00 EDT Last modified on Thu 13 Sep 2018 10.44 EDT
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  Lisa Brennan-Jobs and Steve Jobs

  When Lisa Brennan-Jobs, eldest child of the late Steve Jobs, was three years old, her parents went to court over her father’s refusal to pay child support. Jobs denied paternity, and declared in a deposition that he was sterile. After a DNA test showed they were in fact father and daughter, he agreed to pay her mother, Chrisann Brennan, $500 a month. A few days later, Apple became a public company and Jobs’s net worth shot up overnight to $200m.

  Relating this tale in her memoir, Brennan-Jobs doesn’t berate or make excuses for her father. As the founder of NeXT and co-founder of Apple, Jobs enjoyed enormous power in his working life. At home, he exerted power by withholding things: money, conversation, affection. Nowadays his behaviour would be seen as abusive, but, for Brennan-Jobs, it was normal. It was simply what her father did.

  'For him,' she says, 'I was a blot on a spectacular ascent.'
  The title of this memoir comes from Jobs’s nickname for his daughter, a term of endearment that demonstrated he was capable of warmth when the mood took him. He was mostly absent until she was eight, when he began dropping by her mother’s house in Palo Alto to take Lisa roller-skating. Grateful as she was for his attention, she remained uncomfortable in his presence, fearful of irritating him or overstepping the mark. Throughout the book, she depicts herself as an outsider whose relationship with her dad was characterised by confusion and shame. “For him,” she says, “I was a blot on a spectacular ascent, as our story did not fit with the narrative of greatness and virtue he might have wanted for himself. My existence ruined his streak.”

  Small Fry isn’t about eliciting sympathy or seeking revenge. Instead she tries to get to the bottom of a relationship mired in awkwardness and unpredictability. In exposing her father’s more unpleasant traits, her language betrays her trepidation. Not given to drama or sentimentality, it is sparse though precise. The more shocking the anecdote, the more economical her description, though her wounds are clear.

  Lisa Brennan-Jobs doesn’t emerge from the book ‘smelling of roses, either’.’
  Lisa Brennan-Jobs doesn’t emerge from the book ‘smelling of roses, either’. Photograph: Caroll Taveras for the Guardian
  There are only fleeting references to Jobs’s working life. This is, after all, Brennan-Jobs’s memoir, not a biography of her father. As well aschronicling her early life, it is a lesson in how our identity and self-esteem are moulded by those charged with the task of raising us. Rejection and frustration are running themes.

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  Brennan-Jobs’s mother is depicted as nurturing, creative and free spirited but also given to frightening outpourings of bitterness at their circumstances. “I don’t want this life,” she once screamed in the car in front of her four-year-old daughter. “I want out. I’m sick of living.” While Jobs could be funny and perceptive, more often he was severe and condescending. Long after his paternity was proven, he would tell people that Lisa wasn’t really his child, and that his existence in her life was an act of charity. He would decide not to pay for things at the last minute, walking out of restaurants without paying the bill, and told his daughter, then nine, that she would never get a penny from him.

  In her teens, as her relationship with her mother became fractious, he invited her to live with him and his wife, Laurene, and their baby son, on the condition that she didn’t see or speak to Chrisann for six months. Brennan-Jobs hoped that living with him would allow her to get to know him better, which in many ways it did. After years of neglect, he now became mean and controlling. When she became involved in after-hours school projects, he felt aggrieved at her absence. “If you want to be part of this family, you need to put in the time,” he would say, and then ignore her for days. He would also grope Laurene in front of her, moaning ostentatiously. When Lisa got up to leave on one such occasion, he stopped her. “‘Hey Lis’,’ he said. ‘Stay here. We’re having a family moment.’”

  The daughter Steve Jobs denied: ‘Clearly I was not compelling enough for my father'
  Read more
  Hers is, of course, a one-sided account, one that has been backed by her mother but staunchly rejected by her stepmother and her aunt, the writer Mona Simpson. In memoirs, as in life, one person’s fact is often another’s fiction. Brennan-Jobs doesn’t emerge smelling of roses either. She is fitfully cruel to her mother, she steals $100 bills from Jobs’s bedroom as a teenager, and compulsively pinches trinkets from his house as he lies dying. In his final days, he asks her if she is going to write about him. “No,” she replies.

  Her father has rarely been portrayed as a saint but Small Fry reveals him as a man capable of startling selfishness and cruelty to those closest to him. Given all she endured, who could begrudge his daughter the last word?

  • Small Fry: a Memoir is published by Atlantic. To order a copy for £14.44 (RRP £16.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

• Sydney Morning Herald
  https://www.smh.com.au/technology/not-the-apple-of-his-eye-steve-jobs-daughter-recalls-a-complicated-man-20180903-p501gj.html
  Word count: 3766

  Not the apple of his eye: Steve Jobs' daughter recalls a complicated man
  Lisa Brennan-Jobs didn’t escape her father's dark side – he could be controlling and neglectful, she reveals in a telling yet tender memoir that seeks to set the record straight.

  By Nellie Bowles

  8 SEPTEMBER 2018
  Lisa Brennan-Jobs today. Some of her father’s more disturbing behaviours were, she insists, “just awkward”.
  Lisa Brennan-Jobs today. Some of her father’s more disturbing behaviours were, she insists, “just awkward”. Photo: Frances F. Denny/The New York Times

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  When Apple co-founder Steve Jobs told his daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs that the Apple Lisa computer was not named after her, it was not a cruel lie to a little girl, she insists – he was teaching her "not to ride on his coat-tails".

  When Jobs refused to install heat in her bedroom, he was not being callous, she says – he was instilling in her a "value system". When a dying Jobs told Brennan-Jobs that she smelled "like a toilet", it was not a hateful snipe, she maintains – he was merely showing her "honesty".

  It's a strange thing to write a devastating memoir with damning details but demand that these things are not, in fact, damning at all. Yet that's exactly what Brennan-Jobs has done in a new memoir, Small Fry. Thanks to a dozen other biographies and films, Apple obsessives already know the broad outlines of Brennan-Jobs' early life: Jobs fathered her at 23, then denied paternity despite a DNA match, and gave little in financial or emotional support even as he became a god of the early computing era. Small Fry is Brennan-Jobs' effort to reclaim her story for herself.

  The backdrop to her raw depictions of life with and without Jobs is 1980s Silicon Valley, where artists and hippies mixed with technologists, ideas of how to build the future flourished, and a cascade of trillions of dollars was just beginning to crash onto the landscape. Brennan-Jobs navigated a childhood on welfare with her mother, artist Chrisann Brennan, and an adolescence ensconced in her father's wealth. In passage after passage of Small Fry, Jobs is vicious to his daughter and those around her. Now, in the days before the book is released, Brennan-Jobs is fearful that it will be received as a tell-all exposé, and not the more nuanced portrait of a family that she intended. She worries that the reaction will be about a famous man's legacy rather than a young woman's story – that she will be erased again, this time in her own memoir.

  On the eve of publication, what Brennan-Jobs wants readers to know is this: Steve Jobs rejected his daughter for years, but that daughter has absolved him. Triumphantly, she loves him, and she wants the book's scenes of their roller skating and laughing together to be as viral as the scenes of him telling her she will inherit nothing.

  Brennan-Jobs' forgiveness is one thing. What's tricky is that she wants the reader to forgive Jobs, too. And she knows that could be a problem. "Have I failed?" she asks. "Have I failed in fully representing the dearness and the pleasure? The dearness of my father, and the outrageous pleasure of being with him when he was in good form?"

  Lisa with Steve in 1987 at her mum Chrisann Brennan’s house.
  Lisa with Steve in 1987 at her mum Chrisann Brennan’s house. Photo: Courtesy of Lisa Brennan-Jobs

  After university, Brennan-Jobs left the United States to work in finance in London and Italy; she later shifted into design, and then freelance writing for magazines and literary journals. Now 40, she has long avoided publicity. She has never been profiled, and she has carefully eluded most of her father's chroniclers. (One exception: screenwriter/director Aaron Sorkin, who called her "the heroine" of his 2015 Steve Jobs biopic.) Brennan-Jobs says she did not trust Walter Isaacson, who wrote the definitive, mega-selling biography of her father in 2011.

  "I never spoke with Walter, and I never read the book, but I know I came off as cold to my father and not caring whether he felt bad," Brennan-Jobs says, sitting in Cantine, a vegan-friendly cafe in Brooklyn's Carroll Gardens neighbourhood. "I was devastated by it.

  "I felt ashamed to be the bad part of a great story," she continues. "And I felt unresolved." And so in Small Fry, she seeks to resolve some of that shame by describing how her childhood unfolded, who key characters were, why it all happened. Brennan-Jobs went back to Silicon Valley and interviewed her family, her friends, her mother's ex-boyfriends, and her father's ex-girlfriend. In her childhood, the region had been green with eucalyptus and full of garage hackers. Now it is the greatest wealth-creation machine in the history of the world, and Jobs remains its towering hero.

  Brennan-Jobs began work on what would become Small Fry not long after her father's 2011 death. Years into writing, she felt rushed by her publisher, Penguin Press, and feared being "tarted up" and made to take advantage of her father's legacy. She wanted to be with a smaller publisher who would work with her and give her more time, and switched to Grove, taking what she says was a 90 per cent cut in her advance. (A spokesperson for Penguin declined to comment.)

  One result of the delay is that Small Fry is entering the public conversation at a time when, across industries, formerly disempowered or ignored women are having their say about powerful men. A memoir by Steve Jobs' first-born was always going to be a publishing sensation, but Brennan-Jobs has inadvertently timed hers to land when the public is even more attuned to marginalised voices – and when many are having darker thoughts about the world Jobs created with his attention-devouring devices.

  Lisa, 3, with her mum Chrisann,
  who she calls a mercurial, hot-tempered free spirit.
  Lisa, 3, with her mum Chrisann, who she calls a mercurial, hot-tempered free spirit. Photo: Courtesy of Lisa Brennan-Jobs

  None of that, of course, was imaginable when Brennan-Jobs was born on May 17, 1978, on a commune farm in Oregon. Her parents, who had met in high school in Cupertino, California, were both 23. Jobs arrived days after the birth and helped name her, but refused to acknowledge that he was the father. To support her family, Chrisann Brennan cleaned houses and used government assistance. Only after the government sued Jobs did he agree to pay child support.

  Small Fry describes how Jobs slowly took a greater interest in his daughter, taking her skating and coming over to her house for visits. Brennan-Jobs moved in with him for a time during high school, when her mother was struggling with money and her temper, but Jobs was cold and had extreme demands for what being a member of the family entailed.

  The neighbours next door worried about the teenage Lisa, and one night, when Jobs was out, they moved her from his house and into theirs. Against Jobs' wishes, the neighbours paid for her to finish college. (He later paid them back.)

  Brennan-Jobs speaks today of "not wanting to alienate people" she loves, but acknowledges that her memoir might do just that. Aside from Jobs, all the central characters are very much alive. "I hope Thanksgiving's okay," she says.

  Her mother is portrayed as a free spirit who nurtured her daughter's creativity, but could be mercurial, hot-tempered and sometimes neglectful. "It was horrendous for me to read," Brennan says. "It was very, very hard. But she got it right."

  Jobs' infamous venom is on frequent display in Small Fry. Out one night at dinner, Jobs turns to his daughter's cousin, Sarah, who has just unknowingly offended him by ordering meat. "'Have you ever thought about how awful your voice is?" Jobs asks Sarah. "Please stop talking in that awful voice." He adds, "You should really consider what's wrong with yourself and try to fix it."

  Brennan-Jobs describes her father's frequent use of money to confuse or frighten her. "Sometimes he decided not to pay for things at the very last minute," she writes, "walking out of restaurants without paying the bill." When her mother found a beautiful house and asked Jobs to buy it for her and Lisa, he agreed it was nice – but bought it for himself and moved in with his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs.

  With Chrisann in the early 1990s.
  With Chrisann in the early 1990s. Photo: Courtesy of Lisa Brennan-Jobs

  Brennan says her daughter has, if anything, underplayed the chaos of her childhood. "She didn't go into how bad it really was, if you can believe that," she says. But Small Fry also contains moments of joy that capture Jobs' spontaneity and unparalleled mind.

  When Brennan-Jobs goes on a school trip to Japan, he arrives unannounced and pulls her out of the program for a day. Father and daughter sit, talking about God and how he sees consciousness. "I was afraid of him and, at the same time, I felt a quaking, electric love," she writes.

  "When I started writing," Brennan-Jobs tells me, "I didn't think he'd be so interesting on the page, and I was almost frustrated that he pulled so much gravity." After Brennan-Jobs moved in with Jobs as a teenager, he forbade her from seeing her mother for six months, as a way to cement her connection to his new family. At the same time, Jobs shifted from neglectful to controlling. When Brennan-Jobs was getting increasingly involved at her high school, starting an opera club and running for freshman-class president, he got upset.

  "This isn't working out. You're not succeeding as a member of this family," Jobs says in the memoir. "You're never around. If you want to be a part of this family, you need to put in the time."

  To appease her father, Brennan-Jobs transferred to another school that was closer to her father's house. She persisted in becoming editor-in-chief of the school newspaper. Her mentor there, a journalism teacher named Esther Wojcicki, says Small Fry is a faithful account. "The dialogue that she had in there between her and Steve was just exactly right," Wojcicki says. "The book is a gift to all of us."

  Early copies of the memoir have circulated among family and friends. Powell Jobs, her children and Jobs' sister, Mona Simpson, give this statement: "Lisa is part of our family, so it was with sadness that we read her book, which differs dramatically from our memories of those times. The portrayal of Steve is not the husband and father we knew. Steve loved Lisa, and he regretted that he was not the father he should have been during her early childhood. It was a great comfort to Steve to have Lisa home with all of us during the last days of his life, and we are all grateful for the years we spent together as a family."

  Lisa today: “Turn the awful package on its head, and it reveals something kind of glorious,” she says.
  Lisa today: “Turn the awful package on its head, and it reveals something kind of glorious,” she says. Photo: Frances F. Denny/The New York Times

  On a hot August day in Brooklyn, Brennan-Jobs and I walk to her studio, a small apartment with brick walls she painted white and a bamboo floor she painted black. While writing Small Fry, she tells me, she covered the mirrors around her work space with paper. "I don't like catching myself in the mirror," she says, "because it's like – 'Oh, self.'"

  Brennan-Jobs says she's nervous about how she'll be described physically in a profile, so I ask her to use her own words. "My face is uneven," she says. "I have small eyes. I wish I had dimples, but I don't. I think right now I look jowly." I interject to say she has delicate features, and freckles, and is about five foot two, with slightly reddish brown hair. "My nose," Brennan-Jobs replies, "is not particularly delicate." She is deeply self-deprecating, saying she's horrified to be doing "a celebrity memoir". She says she's sure The New Yorker will not review the book, and that years ago, her first meeting at her publisher Grove only occurred because Elisabeth Schmitz, the editorial director, was doing a favour for a mutual friend.

  "My first thought on being pitched the book was, 'I don't do this kind of thing. I don't know how to publish a celebrity memoir,' " says Schmitz, who has acquired literary memoirs like naturalist Helen Macdonald's H Is for Hawk. But something about Brennan-Jobs' writing made her reconsider. "From the first page," she says, "her language is fresh, surprising, unpredictable."

  I've read it, and her writing really is compelling. Brennan-Jobs takes the same linguistic knife to herself as she does to others. She writes with disgust about using anecdotes from her childhood to elicit sympathy from others, and she is ashamed to have dropped her father's name during an interview to get into Harvard.

  On August 1, Vanity Fair published an excerpt from Small Fry under the digital headline "I Have a Secret. My Father Is Steve Jobs". A few nights later, Brennan-Jobs called me, worried.

  She hated the title, and on social media, readers were feasting on the more savage details of her account, especially the "toilet" comment. "He was telling me the truth," Brennan-Jobs tells me, adding that the rosewater perfume she wore had turned. "I wasn't aware of it. Sometimes it's nice of someone to tell you what you smell like."

  It was another uncomfortable reminder that even though Small Fry is Brennan-Jobs' story, one written in a precise, literary style, her father's myth looms so large that she cannot control how her words are received. When choosing a narrator for the audio version, she nixed the ones who spoke his lines too harshly or without humour.

  So much of Brennan-Jobs' effort with the memoir seems to be to show how brutal Steve Jobs could be – and, in doing so, to reclaim that brutality for herself. And how she wants to reclaim it is to love it.

  "You get your inheritance, delivered in a lump of coal or whatever in a sort of awful package," she tells me at one point. "And you have to take a lot of time to turn the awful package on its head, and it reveals something kind of glorious, and then you're set free."

  Steve, who could be fun as well as cruel, with Lisa in the early 1980s.
  Steve, who could be fun as well as cruel, with Lisa in the early 1980s. Photo: Courtesy of Lisa Brennan-Jobs

  If Brennan-Jobs is alarmed by the reaction to the toilet-water excerpt, she may be unprepared for what happens when readers encounter more disturbing material. Several times in Small Fry, Jobs engages in what seems like inappropriate affection in front of his daughter. Brennan-Jobs describes him embracing Powell Jobs one day, "pulling her in to a kiss, moving his hand closer to her breasts," and up her thigh, "moaning theatrically".

  Brennan-Jobs tried to leave, her father stopped her: "'Hey Lis,' he said. 'Stay here. We're having a family moment. It's important that you try to be part of this family.' I sat still, looking away as he moaned and undulated." Brennan-Jobs emphasises in this interview that she never felt threatened by her father, and that to her, these scenes show he was "just awkward".

  This kind of display was not an isolated incident, says Brennan-Jobs' mother, who described an upsetting, sexualised conversation between Jobs and their daughter in her 2013 memoir, A Bite in the Apple. One evening, Brennan writes, she let Jobs babysit nine-year-old Lisa. When Brennan came home early, she found Jobs with the girl, "teasing her nonstop about her sexual aspirations", "ridiculing her with sexual innuendos" and "joking about bedroom antics between Lisa and this or that guy".

  Brennan, in her memoir, describes feeling scared for her daughter that night, and wanting to place her body between them and get out of there. "I will be clear," Brennan writes. "Steve was not a sexual predator of children. There was something else going on." Still, after that night, Brennan tells me she tried to make sure there was "a chaperone" when Jobs was with his young daughter for long hours. "He was so inappropriate because he didn't know how to do better," Brennan says. In her book, she characterises Jobs as "on a slide whistle between human and inhuman".

  One afternoon in August, as Brennan-Jobs and I talk in her kitchen, she makes a juice of dandelion greens, pineapple, turmeric and ginger roots. She eats an extremely healthy diet and knows it mirrors her father's, which veered into esoteric California wellness trends, even as pancreatic cancer took over more of his body.

  Brennan-Jobs has a husband, Bill, a longtime Microsoft employee now launching a software start-up. He has two daughters, aged 10 and 12, and he and Brennan-Jobs have a four-month-old son. As she drinks her juice, Bill is nearby with the children, and there's an easygoing energy in the house. "I see my husband and the way he is with his daughters, responsive and alive and sensitive in ways my father would have liked to be," Brennan-Jobs says. "My father would have loved to be a man like that, and he surrounded himself with men like that, but he couldn't be."

  Decades after his child-support lawsuit, Jobs erased his paternity again. Small Fry notes that on his corporate bio on the Apple website, the detail-obsessed chief executive was listed as having three children. But, of course, he had four.

  Steve Jobs in 1984.
  Steve Jobs in 1984. Photo: Alamy

  The most public torchbearer for Jobs' character and legacy is Powell Jobs. With an inherited fortune of some $US21 billion ($28.6 billion), she has engaged in philanthropy and launched the Emerson Collective, an organisation that pursues liberal political activism and for-profit investments, and owns a majority stake in The Atlantic magazine.

  Powell Jobs plays a somewhat "tonic note" in Small Fry, Brennan-Jobs says. Her stepmother brings her into family photos, for example, but many of the descriptions of Powell Jobs are biting. Brennan-Jobs tells me she gave Powell Jobs "the best line" in the book. It appears in a scene where Powell Jobs and Jobs go to a therapy session with a teenage Lisa. Brennan-Jobs cries and says she feels lonely and has wanted them to say good night to her. Powell Jobs responds to the therapist: "We're just cold people."

  Toward the end of Jobs' life, he finally apologised to his daughter. Brennan-Jobs calls it her "movie ending". In the book, she writes that Jobs says he is sorry he did not spend more time with her, and for disappearing during her adulthood, forgetting birthdays and not returning notes or calls. In reply, Brennan-Jobs says she knows he was busy. Jobs answers that he acted the way he did because she had offended him.

  "It wasn't because I was busy. It was because I was mad you didn't invite me to the Harvard weekend," he says in the book, referring to a matriculation event. He also cries and tells her over and over again, "I owe you one" – a famously articulate communicator unable to summon the basic language of contrition.

  Brennan-Jobs may be experiencing a kind of author's remorse as her book makes its way toward store shelves. But details as lethal as these – they sink into Jobs' legend like daggers to the hilt – are more proof than any DNA test that she is her father's daughter. Ultimately, Jobs left his daughter an inheritance in the millions, the same amount as his other children, and she is not involved in the allocation of his financial legacy. If she was in charge of his billions, she says, she would give it away to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation – a curious twist given her father's epic rivalry with Apple's arch-nemesis.

  "Would it be too perverse?" she asks. "I feel like the Gates Foundation is really doing good stuff, and I think I would just hot-potato it away."

  Brennan-Jobs says she wrote Small Fry in part to figure out why he withheld money from her even as his wealth ballooned, and as he spent it more freely on the children he had with Powell Jobs. She says she now sees it was about teaching her that money can corrupt. The ethos "felt true and kind of beautiful and kind of enlightened for somebody like that". The question was "why he would have taken that value system and applied it so severely to me".

  "You can have a value system and be unable to totally live it," she adds. "And you can imagine being that rich and famous and how amazing it is if you can hold on to some of your value system. He didn't do it right. He didn't apply it evenly. But I feel grateful for it."

  Brennan-Jobs tells me she likes toying with the strange power of being a memoirist writing about trauma because the reader knows she made it out okay. She is here in the privileged position of writing this book, after all. And as a memoirist, even a reluctant one, she gets the final word. One night toward the end of Jobs' life – and the end of the book – he is watching Law and Order in bed. "'Are you going to write about me?'" he asks Lisa. She tells him no. "'Good,' he says, and turns back to the television."

  Small Fry by Lisa Brennan-Jobs (Grove Press, $30) is out on September 12.

  Edited version of a story first published in The New York Times. © 2018 The New York Times.

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