Steve Jobs’ daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs writes ‘Small Fry’ memoir

Lisa
Brennan-Jobs.

Wikimedia
Commons

• Lisa Brennan-Jobs, daughter of former Apple CEO Steve
  Jobs, published an excerpt from her upcoming book that deals
  with her difficult relationship with her father.
• The chapter, carried by Vanity Fair, covers some
  heartbreaking incidents, such as his denying paternity and
  refusing child-support payouts.
• Brennan-Jobs outlines her sense of alienation from her
  father, and her childhood wish of having a normal relationship
  with him.
• The new, rare portrait of Jobs adds more nuance to
  portrayals of him as a visionary CEO, showing that he could be
  cruel in his personal life.

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Lisa Brennan-Jobs, daughter of Apple CEO Steve Jobs, has
published an excerpt from her upcoming memoir “Small Fry” — and
it contains heartbreaking details about her difficult
relationship with her father.

This is the first time Brennan-Jobs has written in depth about
her father, who initially denied paternity and refused to pay
child support payments to her mother Chrisann Brennan. Jobs died
in 2011 aged 56 after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

The excerpt,
published in Vanity Fair’s September issue, opens with a
literary rendering of Steve Jobs’ final days, presided over by a
Buddhist monk who instructed a visiting Lisa to “touch his feet.”
Jobs converted to Buddhism at a young age.

Brennan-Jobs describes visiting her sick father every weekend,
and trying to fit in around her stepmother Laurene Powell and her
three half-siblings.

Laurene Powell and Steve
Jobs.
Diana Walker / Contour by Getty
Images

She wrote: “I had given up on the possibility of a grand
reconciliation, the kind in the films, but I kept coming
anyway.”

The excerpt also deals with Jobs turning up to his daughter’s
birth in 1978 and denying paternity until the district attorney
of San Mateo County, California forced him to take a test and to
cough up child support.

In one telling detail, Brennan-Jobs outlines how Jobs’ lawyers
insisted on finalising child support payouts and other payments
on December 8, 1980. Four days later, Apple would IPO and Jobs
would become immensely wealthy.

She also recalled believing that her father replaced his Porsche
every time it had a scratch, and asking if she could have his
current model when he got rid of it.

“You’re not getting anything,” he responded. “You understand?
Nothing. You’re getting nothing.”

Brennan-Jobs added that her father had not been “generous with
money, or food, or words.”

The excerpt is shot with Brennan-Jobs’ childhood sense that she
didn’t have a normal relationship with her father, and simply
wanting to be closer to him.

She wrote: “For him, 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.
For me, it was the opposite: The closer I was to him, the less I
would feel ashamed; he was part of the world, and he would
accelerate me into the light.”

She uses the Apple Lisa, the failed precursor to the Macintosh,
as a metaphor for her attempts to belong to her father.

Apple
Lisa.
Flickr/Frank
Fujimoto

“Was it named after me?” she asked her father at one point.

“Nope. Sorry kid,” he responded.

But in a sign of their changing relationship, she recalls a later
episode where Jobs invited her on holiday with the whole family —
and took them all to visit his friend, U2 frontman Bono.

Bono repeated Lisa’s question, asking Jobs if he named the Lisa
after his daughter. This time, he responds with: “Yup.”