The longing of Jobs’ daughter
Lisa Brennan-Jobs writes of Apple founder as parent
In the opening pages of Lisa BrennanJobs’ graceful and emotionally raw new memoir, “Small Fry,” she describes visiting her ailing father, Apple founder Steve Jobs, in the final months of his life and being overcome with the desire to furtively pocket small trinkets from his Palo Alto home. Nail polish. An old pillowcase. Chipped celadon bowls.
“After stealing each item, I felt sated. I promised myself that would be the last time. But soon the urge to take something else would arrive again like thirst,” she writes.
It’s a fitting entry point into BrennanJobs’ coming-of-age story. While “Small Fry” is successful on several levels — as the story of a scrappy, observant girl growing up in still laid-back 1980s and early-’90s Silicon Valley, and as an upclose, warts-and-all portrait of her famously mercurial father — it is above all an extended rumination on longing.
Brennan-Jobs was made to feel insignificant, even unwanted, at a young age by Jobs, who publicly denied paternity of young Lisa as his tech career ascended. He later reappeared in her life when she was 8 and living in Palo Alto with her struggling artist mother, Chrisann Brennan, who met Jobs in 1972 in high school in Cupertino and had Lisa out of wedlock in 1978. But Jobs’ attention remained capricious, unreliable. He vacillated between sporadic displays of affection and coldness, a pattern that persisted in the father-daughter relationship until his death in 2011.
“Small Fry” is a tender portrait of a girl who doesn’t yet realize the extent to which she’ll try anything — even stealing valueless knickknacks — to quell the deep craving for more from her emotionally withholding father, to stifle what she calls the “pain of being his daughter and not being his daughter.”
“It was just an incredibly powerful urge, so surprisingly powerful it actually makes me laugh,” Brennan-Jobs, 40, said during a recent interview outside a Palo Alto cafe. She was back in the Bay Area from Brooklyn with her husband, Bill, and their 5-month-old son, Thomas, for book events, including a reading that evening at her alma mater, Palo Alto High School.
“I realized later, ‘Oh, that’s magical
thinking, right?’ Intellectually, I knew it was crazy, misplaced. But it felt so real, like this lip gloss will compensate for the loss, will legitimize me. Poof, I’ll feel legitimate.”
That yearning to feel that her place in the world is justified permeates “Small Fry,” and Brennan-Jobs circles back to the idea of “legitimacy” repeatedly in conversation. She calls the “long, excruciating” process of spending more than seven years mining her memories to write the book a need “to answer the question, Do I have a right to exist?”
Brennan-Jobs knows many readers will come to the book out of fascination with her father’s protean mystique, yet she hopes people find a more universally resonant story “and are able to see beyond the fame. Isn’t everyone, to some degree, existentially struggling with the feeling of illegitimacy?” she asked. “Fairy tales and stories like ‘Matilda’ wouldn’t be so universally appealing if everyone didn’t feel in some corner of their heart that they were also the bastard stepchild. I just happen to actually be the bastard stepchild.”
With her dark hair pinned back, brown eyes and easy smile, Brennan-Jobs has an undeniable resemblance to her father. She spoke openly about not only the pain and loneliness of paternal neglect, but also the unmitigated joy of time spent in Jobs’ dazzling aura.
“Imagine you have this dad who comes back when you’re 8 and, oh my God, he’s handsome, charming, funny, so charismatic,” she said. “It’s a weird feeling to realize I had a father who almost everybody was looking at the way that daughters look at their fathers, with such love and admiration.”
Yet there was always too the feeling of being “an outsider looking in,” Brennan-Jobs said, which was only exacerbated by Jobs’ unavailability. “I’d be in an airport traveling, for instance, and not able to get ahold of my father, and at the same time I’d see his picture on the cover of all these magazines.”
For years, Brennan-Jobs, who had written as a freelancer for magazines, didn’t want to write about her famous father. “I desperately wanted to write another nonfiction book first. But the problem was the memoir was kind of the dam holding everything else back.”
She also knew “Small Fry” would receive more scrutiny than your average debut memoir but admits feeling surprised by some early reactions by readers who were aghast at her depictions of Jobs’ viciousness: that he denied for years that the Mac-precursor Lisa computer, a commercial failure, was in fact named after her; refused to install heat in her bedroom when she lived with him during high school; treated her like a second-class sibling, shouldered out of family photos.
“I am literally the last person to write about the fact that he sometimes wasn’t nice. How can this be a shock to anybody?” BrennanJobs said. “There are movies and books and so many articles about this. In my book there’s actually a lot of joy and tenderness that wasn’t in these other things.”
Evidently not enough of either to satisfy her stepmother, Laurene Powell Jobs, her aunt Mona Simpson or Lisa’s three halfsiblings, who issued a joint statement saying, “The portrayal of Steve is not the husband and father we knew.”
“People have written about me my whole life since I was 3, and I know that it really can be quite jarring to read about yourself as portrayed by someone else,” said Brennan-Jobs. “But I come back to this issue of, ‘Do I have the right to say what my own truth is?’ ”
While Brennan-Jobs was chatty when asked about the book’s most painful episodes, she started to tear up when the conversation turned to her feelings about being back in Northern California. (Her mother now lives in Sausalito.)
“I really, really like spending time here. I love the hills that from far away look so smooth but up close are rugged and scratchy, and the smell of bay laurel and eucalyptus. It’s kind of a great thing to write a book about your hometown.”
The same nostalgia for a bygone Silicon Valley is palpable on the pages of “Small Fry”: “Things were slower, and it wasn’t all about money.”
An Apple Store was only two blocks away. Brennan-Jobs said she’s not affected “in the way people sometimes think” by living in a world she knows was radically transformed by a device her father created.
That said, her son “was playing with an iPhone the other day and I thought, ‘Oh my God. Wow. I guess his grandfather helped invent that.’ That is kind of cool.”