Young parents who separated soon after her birth, a father who denied paternity and only paid child support under duress, and a mother who was barely scraping by would add a whole new level of complexity to anyone’s coming-of-age memoir. But this author’s father just happened to be Steve Jobs, the iconic parent of the Apple iFamily, NeXT, and Pixar.
Several notable biographies have covered Jobs’ life and career in depth, describing his relationship with his first daughter along the way, but in Small Fry, Lisa Brennan-Jobs finally gets to speak for herself.
Chrisann Brennan and Jobs had broken up after Chrisann discovered she was pregnant. Jobs came to visit when Lisa was born and helped to name her, but had little to do with her thereafter. He actively rejected the idea of fatherhood: for years after the DNA test he would tell people that 28% of the male population could have been Lisa’s father, based on his own mathematical calculations. (Take a look online for pictures of the two of them together — the resemblance is startling even when Lisa was a little girl) After a DNA test forced upon him by the State of California, his lawyers arranged for low child support payments in a hurry, a week before Apple went public and he became a multi-millionaire.
As Lisa grew older, however, he seemed to enjoy the occasional visit and show a little more interest in her. A relationship of sorts developed, albeit driven by Jobs in his own erratic, unreliable way.
Not surprisingly, Lisa grew up fixated on her father. She name-dropped him for social currency, she longed to be a part of his life and to be included in his family, she tiptoed around his feelings to gain his affection or approval. She clearly cherishes the memory of each time he dropped by, each skating trip around the Stanford campus, each visit to his enormous houses, the time he spent hours showing her fonts and teaching her words like ‘sans-serif’, the random moments of affection.
Money, or the lack thereof, played an unavoidable part in the early lives of Lisa and Chrisann, and the vast gap between their rented-apartment lifestyle and Jobs’ mansions and cars is hard to ignore.
And yet there is no note of self-pity in the book. Quite the opposite, in fact. Lisa goes to great lengths to explain her father’s attitudes.
We all made allowances for his eccentricities, the ways he attacked other people, because he was also brilliant, and sometimes kind and insightful.
He was teaching us not to ride on his coattails.
She is meticulously honest about her own behaviour as well — shoplifting, pilfering from her parents, lying, name-dropping her father to get into Harvard — and describes these incidents without rationalization. Wonder where she inherited that objectiveness and attention to detail?
Jobs’ casual cruelty in word and deed, and his social awkwardness are not unexpected. It’s easy to imagine how his well-known perfectionist streak can become controlling when he’s dealing with other humans. Rather more unnerving is his exhibitionism: make-out sessions with his girlfriends in front of his 6- or 9- or 12-year old daughter, and casual comments to her about his girlfriends’ bodies or her own sex life.
[Photo at paloaltohistory.org]
Small Fry is also a memoir about growing up in a quieter, gentler Bay Area.
We skated the neighborhood streets. Fuchsia dangled from bushes in yards, stamens below a bell of petals, like women in ball gowns with purple shoes. Some streets wound around huge oak trees. Some had been cracked by roots and earthquakes, the curvy fissures filled in with shiny black tar.
Lisa has an eye for beauty, and even as a child, interesting words and people with large vocabularies captured her attention. These are useful traits for a memoirist. The word that comes to mind when reading her memoir is ‘precise’, rather than ‘lyrical’ or ‘elegant’, but the writing seems very much in her own voice and reflective of her own personality.
What impelled Lisa to write her story? Exorcising the demons of her past? The desire to have her own say, to control the narrative? To state the facts as she saw them, without judgement or sentiment? To add her own view of the icon to the Jobs Canon? Perhaps all of the above, and I’d say she’s succeeded.
Small Fry, by Lisa Brennan-Jobs. Grove Press, 2018
This is a fascinating read. I was sad when it was over.
It confirms my suspicion that Jobs was a mediocre and awful human being.
Chrisann Brennan also wrote a book in which she describes his great happiness and relief when Lisa agreed to take his last name. His wife Laurene and sister Mona put out a statement saying that Jobs loved Lisa and this book did not reflect the man they knew. And Jobs himself, towards the end of his life, told Lisa he was sorry and he hadn’t done right by her. So there’s all of that.
But certainly, he was in no way a ‘nice’ or ‘kind’ person. Nor are many other driven, perfectionist, talented people. This book very clearly, almost unemotionally, shows the effect of all that on the people around them, especially those who have very little power, like children.
The good news is that Lisa seems pretty ok now.
Not to beat up on a dead man but there are many other sources of information about the kind of person he was. He was known to park in handicapped spots at the Apple campus, he was known to have fired Apple employees he barely knew for frivolous reasons, he cheated his Apple cofounder, he claimed to be sterile and employed high paid lawyers to deny a fair settlement to his first daughter’s mother…. The list goes on.
Many people think he was a technical genius and that that in some way ‘explains’ such sociopathic behaviours (or that such behaviour is the price for his ‘genius’). The fact of the matter is that he stole or borrowed all his creations from others. If he was good at something it was being a great salesman.
Even if one knew nothing else about him, this book would leave one with a distinctly negative impression.