Lisa Brennan-Jobs is the daughter of Steve Jobs, and in her new memoir Small Fry she fills a much-needed gap in our knowledge about the life of the Apple Computer entrepreneur. Which is a shame. We liked that gap, and now there seems no way to get it back.
Of course, there's another way to read Brennan-Jobs's memoir of growing up a rich man's daughter. Maybe Small Fry is best understood as a necessary corrective. After all, back in 2011, Walter Isaacson wrote a bestselling book about Steve Jobs that was as close to hagiography as biography is allowed to get in these mistrustful days. She had refused to be interviewed by Isaacson for that book, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, she appears in its pages mostly as a ghost: cold and indifferent, making occasional appearances that discomfort her family. And so with Small Fry she has now penned her own account, determined to set the record straight. It's a simple matter of truth-telling. It's a simple matter of laying out how things actually were.
But Brennan-Jobs seems not to have grasped some of the truths about memoir-writing—beginning with the fact that all memoir is a species of lie. Or, at least, all attempts at autobiography suffer from the problem of selection: which stories to remember, which to forget; which incidents to foreground, which to let slip into the background.
And the memoir of childhood is a creature of interpretation perhaps most of all. A small handful of people had unremittingly awful lives when they were young. An even smaller handful of people had unremittingly delightful lives. But most of those who grow up to write books fall somewhere in the middle. Give a certain twist, and almost anyone's childhood can be made to seem a horror. Give a different twist, and almost anyone's childhood can be made to seem a joy. If we look at the past through rose-colored glasses, we get Clarence Day's 1935 Life with Father or the Gilbreth children's 1948 Cheaper by the Dozen. If we look through smoke-colored glasses, we get Mary Gordon's 1996 The Shadow Man or Tara Westover's 2018 Educated: A Memoir.
Or, for that matter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs's grim new childhood memoir Small Fry. For decades now we have been trained as readers to suspect that sweet views of the past are hiding something and families couldn't have been as happy in the midst of privation as they seem in Sydney Taylor's 1951 All-of-a-Kind Family or Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie books, which began to appear in 1932. But we have yet to internalize the lesson that distressed views are just as suspect. If rose-colored lenses obscure truths about the past, then so do smoke-colored lenses—particularly in an age in which darkness sells. From the 1930s through the 1950s, Americans wanted to read memoirs of happy childhoods, and that's what Americans got. From the 1990s through the 2010s, a hunger seemed to develop for memoirs of unhappy childhoods. Why is it any surprise that this is what publishers urged their writers to write?
Brennan-Jobs has been working on the memoir since her father's death in 2011, but little in the text explains why it took so long to finish. She was born in 1978 on a commune in Oregon when her parents were both 23 years old. Her father was already beginning to move up in the computer world, traveling back and forth to California, and when he returned to Oregon after her birth, he refused to acknowledge her as his child. Soon he departed for good, declining to help the struggling mother and daughter. Only after a 1980 court order, following DNA tests, did he begin to pay child support of $385 a month—rushing to finalize the payments on December 8, 1980. Four days later Apple went public, and Jobs was suddenly worth hundreds of millions.
In the following years, Jobs decided to make appearances in his daughter's life, visiting her occasionally to babysit or take her skating, which she remembers fondly. At a time when Lisa Brennan-Jobs's mother was struggling, financially and emotionally, Jobs even moved the girl into his house. Not that it worked out all that well. The teenager ended up in the house of some worried neighbors, who paid for her college education. (To his credit, Jobs did eventually pay them back.)
As in nearly every childhood memoir these days, a grim spirit pervades Small Fry. At times—in the book itself and even more in recent interviews about its publication—Brennan-Jobs seems uncomfortable with what she recognizes as her prevailing tone. But she can't seem to do anything about it. The anecdotes that come to mind, the set pieces around which the narrative is built, are uniformly unhappy. When a cousin orders meat in a restaurant, disappointing the vegetarian Jobs, he turns on her to ask, "Have you ever thought about how awful your voice is?" When the girl blanches, he adds, "Please stop talking in that awful voice. You should really consider what’s wrong with yourself and try to fix it."
Her mother once found a house and asked Jobs to help pay for it so she and Brennan-Jobs could live near him. He agreed it was beautiful and then bought it for himself and his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs. "We're just cold people," that wife would tell Brennan-Jobs, and Small Fry suggests she was right. When the girl was a freshman in high school, her success at extracurricular activities prompted Jobs to tell her, "You're never around"—condescending to explain, "This isn't working out. You're not succeeding as a member of this family."
As for the prurient bits, we get an extended account of how Jobs once groped his wife and pretended to be having sex with her, demanding that his daughter stay in the room because it was a "family moment." Brennan-Jobs's mother, in her own memoir, has written how Jobs once babysat the girl when she was nine—and spent the time "teasing her non-stop about her sexual aspirations" and "joking about bedroom antics between Lisa and this or that guy." When he moved her into his own house, he demanded that she have no contact with her mother for six months and refused to put a heater in her bedroom, in order that she develop a "value system."
And then he consistently denied that he had named the Lisa computer after her, before admitting it, toward the end of his life, to the singer Bono. He repeatedly told his daughter she would get none of his money, though in the end he left her millions (out of his billions). And on his death bed, he told her she smelled like a toilet.
The interesting point is that she did actually smell that way. Brennan-Jobs was behaving oddly in her father's final months—as well she ought to have been, facing the loss of the most interesting, disturbing, frightening, and inspiring figure in her life. On her visits, she would walk around the house stealing minor things and then putting them back. She sat in the bathroom for minute after minute, dousing her self with rose water—misting it into the air around her and then diving up into the spray like a porpoise. And when she then went to his bedroom, Jobs snarked, unpleasantly but not inaccurately, on the odor she had picked up.
And this is the dismal lesson of Lisa Brennan-Jobs's memoir. That rose-mist story could have been told as comedy, a light-hearted anecdote about a young woman and her beloved father. Instead, Small Fry relates it as an image of tragedy, a heavy-hearted anecdote about an aging daughter and the cold father who never really loved her. It's dishonorable, of course, not to protect her father's reputation. But even more, Small Fry is a sad read—a tale of a girl who cannot live in father's light and, even now, cannot escape his shadow.