Steve Jobs’ daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs is out with her memoir "Small Fry". She, with some unknown details, has described the difficult relationship she shared with her famous father. She, however, said that she forgives the tech icon. “Small Fry” is Brennan-Jobs’s effort to reclaim her story for herself.
Things we didn't know about Jobs which his daughter tells us
1. Steve Jobs fathered Brennan-Jobs at 23, then denied paternity despite a DNA match. He provided little financial or emotional support in early years of Lisa's life. Chrisann Brennan, Lisa's mother, was an artist. Even after he accepted her as his daughter and court-ordered child support, their relationship was often a tough one. The memoir, to some extent, paints Jobs in a picture that was hardly visible to us.
2. Brennan-Jobs also describes how at some point, her father slowly took a greater interest in her. He took her skating and visited her house to meet her. She moved in with him for a time during high school, when her mother was struggling with money and her temper.
3. The memoir reveals how Jobs was cold and had extreme demands for what being a member of the family required. “I was afraid of him and, at the same time, I felt a quaking, electric love,” she writes, in her memoir.
4. Brennan-Jobs has mentioned about attending a therapy session as a teenager along with her father and stepmother, Laurene Powell Jobs. She told the therapist how she felt lonely and wanted her parents to say goodnight to her. She alleges that Powell Jobs told the therapist: “We’re just cold people.”
5. A DNA test proved Steve’s paternity only after 1980 with the court requiring minimal child-support payments and medical insurance coverage for Lisa until age 18. This was finalised just four days before Apple went public, making the tech giant a millionaire, according to the memoir.
6. In some instances, Brennan-Jobs mentioned of her father’s frequent use of money to confuse or frighten her. “Sometimes he decided not to pay for things at the very last minute,” she writes, “walking out of restaurants without paying the bill”. In one instance, she reveals, how her mother found a beautiful house and asked Jobs to buy it for them. He agreed it was nice, but he purchased it for himself and moved in with his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs.
7. Brennan-Jobs moved in with her father as a teenager. He forbade her from seeing her mother for six months, as a way to strengthen her connection with his new family. Jobs, at the same time, shifted from neglectful to controlling. She also described the time when, at 28, she finally decided to call him "Dad" instead of "Steve". She asked him, and he said yes.
8. In one excerpt, Brennan-Jobs claims he told her that she “smelled like a toilet”, when she visited Jobs on his deathbed. She, however, said her father was being honest about the same. “I wasn’t aware of it," she told the New York Times. "Sometimes it’s nice of someone to tell you what you smell like.”
In Small Fry, Lisa writes that at the end of Steve’s life, he apologised to her for being negligent and absent while she was growing up. He also repeatedly told her, “I owe you one.”
While promoting his authorised biography in 2011, Steve spoke about some of his regrets. “I’ve done a lot of things I’m not proud of. Such as getting my girlfriend pregnant when I was 23 and the way I handled that.”
He lost his battle with cancer in 2011.
Brennan-Jobs told NY Times that, despite her challenging years, she forgives her father. She also wants to remember happy times that they spent together. She described the dearness of her father, and the outrageous pleasure of being with him whenever he was in good form.
Powell-Jobs, her children and Jobs' sister Mona Simpson issued a joint statement saying, “Lisa is part of our family, so it was with sadness that we read her book, which differs dramatically from our memories of those times. The portrayal of Steve is not the husband and father we knew. Steve loved Lisa, and he regretted that he was not the father he should have been during her early childhood. It was a great comfort to Steve to have Lisa home with all of us during the last days of his life, and we are all grateful for the years we spent together as a family.”
Small Fry goes on sale on September 4.
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