Rebecca's Reviews > Small Fry

(3.5) What was it like to have Steve Jobs as your dad? That question has already drawn many to Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s debut memoir. You don’t need to have any particular interest in Apple computers or in technology in general to read and enjoy this; all you need is curiosity about how families work, especially amid complications like disputed paternity, half-siblings, and the peculiarities of behaviour common to geniuses and madmen.

Apart from brief flashbacks to her earliest years and a few scenes surrounding her father’s death, Brennan-Jobs focuses on her life between ages seven and 18, as she bounced between her parents and tried desperately to secure her aloof father’s love and approval. From the start, Jobs distanced himself from Lisa, even refusing to acknowledge her as his child until a DNA test proved it. So she lived with her mother, Chrisann Brennan, an artist who worked multiple jobs but still struggled to make ends meet. Though it also played out in the Silicon Valley of California, this hardscrabble mother-and-daughter life couldn’t have been more different from the opulent lifestyle Lisa glimpsed when she stayed at her father’s mansions.

Jobs’s behaviour was contradictory and unpredictable. Sometimes he went out of his way to help Lisa, like when he wrote a fulsome recommendation to get her into a desirable school. But more often he treated her with disdain. When she lived with him and his wife Laurene, he refused to fix the heating in Lisa’s room and relied on her for free babysitting after her half-siblings were born. He asked her inappropriately sexual questions as she became a teenager. Lisa always felt she had to earn her father’s love. His all-or-nothing outlook was meant to induce guilt: Unless she missed school for a week to go to Hawaii with him and Laurene, she wasn’t really part of their family; if she went back to her mother, she was out of the family.

Of course, Lisa wasn’t the only victim of Jobs’s wanton cruelty. Woe to any waitress who got his order wrong! But there’s something especially heartbreaking about a little girl reaching out for proof that her father loves her, only to be rejected. One telling example concerns the early Apple model called “Lisa.” As a child, when she asked multiple times if he’d named the computer after her, he said no. Only late in his life – when asked by Bono, no less – did Jobs finally admit in her hearing that the Lisa was indeed named for her. “We all made allowances for his eccentricities, the ways he attacked other people, because he was also brilliant, and sometimes kind and insightful,” she writes. Yet “I felt he’d crush me if I let him.”

I was impressed by the volume and texture of the memories here. The dialogue must all be invented, but the sheer number of scenes and the detail in which Brennan-Jobs remembers them are astonishing. It would take me many hours of concentration to remember even a handful of similar scenes from my years in schooling. You get the feeling that the author was fiercely observant. She notes that very quality in herself at one point: “I was not only in this pitiable situation, but watching it; I was both the one hurt and the narrator of the hurt.”

Brennan-Jobs’s recreation of her child and teenage perspective is generally convincing, and she uses apt everyday metaphors to describe her relationships: “my father far away, glinting like a shard of mirror; my mother so close and urgent” and “an unmistakable emptiness I felt near him, a feeling of a vast loneliness—the stair behind the kitchen with no light, the wind coming through from the rickety balcony.”

In the end, there are perhaps no great revelations or transformations in the book; it is simply a record of life through one person’s eyes, and thus it’s not surprising that other members of the family have disputed her version of events. A memoir is pure subjectivity, but as you are reading – if it’s written as well as this one – you can’t help but go along with every word. I would be interested to read a biography of Jobs to see how the picture of him compares, but mostly I valued Small Fry as an illuminating account of a difficult father–daughter relationship, no matter who or how famous its subject.

Originally published at Nudge.