I should say up front that Steve Jobs was an important figure in my life.
He made it possible for people like me, who are technically impaired and know nothing about computing, to write my books on a computer, do my banking on a cell phone, take photos that people buy, start a blog in my own office, store my photos in space, even take short movies of my life on the farm.
And he made sure there is always someone on the other end of the phone to help.
I will always be grateful for what his genius did for people like me, but the Jobs I read about in this memoir makes my stomach turn over.
Lisa Brennan-Jones, his first child, loved him dearly but even if she says she forgave him for how he treated her, I found it hard to do so after reading her book, Small Fry: A Memoir.
The book begins as an account of the relationship between Lisa and Chrisann, a volatile artist who once lived with but did not marry Steve Jobs. They had a child, Lisa, who Jobs refused to acknowledge for years, although he sent money from time to time.
Lisa wants nothing more in life than to be close to her father and spend more time with him. It doesn’t happen, except when she is dragged on trips against her will.
By the time Lisa gets to middle school, her fights with her mother become so intense that Lisa moves in with her father, and his new wife, Laurene. Sometimes, Steve and Laurene make out in front of Lisa, “moaning theatrically, as if for an audience.”
Jobs was a transformative figure, he changed our world. In so many ways, he made my creative life possible. I do not believe I would be writing today of not for me, I always believed he was a fierce advocate for people like me, he had so much more to do with my life than my own father.
Yet in Small Fry, the Jobs we meet is an almost pathologically troubled and insensitive human and father. Lisa, who spent much of her life ping-ponging back and forth between her dysfunctional mother and her cold and cruel father, has written a very powerful memoir about her very unhappy life and her life-long efforts to be loved and known by her father.
I am by no means a perfect father, but I kept wishing in this book that somebody would call child protective services and get her out of there. It was a kind of torture by indifference and manipulation.
Job’s wife Laurene and his sister Mona Simpson issued a statement after the book came out saying this view of Jobs was not the Steve Jobs that they knew and loved.
Maybe not, but it was the one Lisa Brennan-Jobs lived with and loved, and the one she describes in her memoir.
She was caught in a never-ending whirlpool, fighting with her mother so intensely that her school threatened to call the authorities, hating life with her father so much that she went to live with some neighbors. She seemed to go from one Hell to another.
Lisa was endlessly accepting of her father’s cruelty and abuse, she never did get enough of him, and he never gave her much of anything – no heat for her room, tuition for her college, or even agreeing to say good night to her when she was lonely and begging for company.
The best line I’ve read about this book was from Katy Waldman of the New Yorker, she wrote that Job’s beautifully written book seems more wounded than triumphant, more confused than clear, at times it feels like “artfully sculpted scar tissue.”
Sometimes, it hurt just to read it.
It is also a gripping read, hard to put down. You almost can’t wait to see what Jobs or her mother will do to her next.
In her telling, Jobs was not only unpredictable, but sexually inappropriate – he insisted on fondling his wife in front of Lisa. He refused for years to admit Lisa was his daughter, and denied for years naming a computer after her.
Shortly before he died, he told her she smelled like a toilet. Lisa forgives him everything but writes a devastating portrait. Her famous father appears as a brilliant man with no idea how to be the father he wanted to be and that she desperately wanted him to be.
As described in this memoir, he was emotionally unfit to be a parent to this child.
He was not quite a monster, except once or twice. Yes, he could be loving and generous at times, and yes, he could be pointlessly cruel and heartless at times.
Shattered by repeated rejections (he wouldn’t permit her in family photographs or pay her last year’s tuition at Harvard or speak to her for years because she didn’t invite him to a family weekend, she seemed to retreat into kind of fantasy world.)
Her life, according to her memoir, centered around the idea that Jobs would love and accept her, something we know from the first chapter will never happen.
A curious thing about this book is that Lisa meticulously details Job’s offenses against her, but never once condemns him or his behavior. I found myself doing a lot of it for her.
In the memoir, there are two Lisas, one in unbearable pain, the other desperately trying to charm her father and draw him closer to him. It hurts to read this kind of broken-hearted schizophrenia and passivity. I often read that this is how abused women sometimes behave.
She sometimes forces herself to leave, but always comes back for more.
I understand that Jobs could simply not be a normal father, I’m sure he was doing to his daughter what was done to him. I’m sure there are reasons for this behavior. It’s just that none are mentioned.
I don’t understand why as sophisticated and passionate a man as jobs could do this to his daughter, and Brennan-Jobs never really tries to explain it. She just suffers through it. Again and again.
This remains a bewildering mystery to me when I think of this book.
It seems to me that when a writer paints do devastating a portrait of a parent and writes so detailed an account of it, she might at least try once to tell us how he came to be this way. Did she ever wonder?
I am learning over and over again – I read lots of biographies of brilliant people – that the people who accomplish the greatest things are also often the most damaged and screwed up. I just have to accept it, something about fractured souls produces great things. I now separate the deeds from the people. I accept both.
Their brokenness sometimes and somehow leads them to visions most of us don’t have and will never quite grasp.
Jobs almost single-handedly transformed the lives of billions of people around the world. He was one of the greatest figures in my lifetime.
Mostly, this memoir, and it is a memoir, not a tell-all celebrity study – can break your heart. There is the awful mess that Lisa’s life was, almost from the first day. And there is Job’s utter and sometimes inhuman failure as a caring and compassionate human being, at least when it comes to this child.
“I wish I could go back,” he tells his daughter on his death-bed. “I wish I could change it.” She responds in the book that she grieves “our missed chance at friendship,” and the scene, and the book, ends.
You were a genius, Steve. You of all people must have known it is lame to hope to go back in time to someone you hurt that much. Why did you wait so long to apologize?
It was not a satisfying ending for me, Job’s cruelty to her daughter left her with great talent, but also a kind of emotional dysfunction and paralysis, at least in this book.
She seemed to suffer a kind of Stockholm Syndrome, caught in this spiral of forgiving and tolerating and accepting her messed up father, but never really condemning him or getting angry. I couldn’t find a sense of morality, an ability to be outraged by great wrongs.
For me, that was the biggest flaw in the book.
I love the way Lisa Brennan-Jobs writes and I appreciate the vividness and care of her details. Her portraits of Palo Alto at the outset of the rise of Jobs an Apple and the tsunami that Silicon Valley was about to unleash on America were brilliant. So was her account of a troubled child, yearning for a sane and loving place somewhere in the world.
Money sure does not bring happiness or create happy people.
Whatever else her father did to her – he often told her she had no skills to bring to the world – he couldn’t keep her from becoming a terrific writer. I hope she writes about something else next time.
“I was unsure of my position in the house,” she wrote of the time she went to live with Jobs and his new wife, “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 and love.”
No such luck for Lisa Brennan-Jobs. When a therapist asked them what the trouble was with Lisa, they both replied. “We are cold people.”
I’ll be thinking about this book for a while, comforting myself with the idea that people who do great things are often not very nice people.
I do recommend this book, it is powerful reading, a wrenching memoir of isolation and lost opportunity.
