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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/books/review/lisa-brennan-jobs-small-fry.html
NONFICTION
The Father of Personal Computing Who Was Also a Terrible Dad
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Lisa Brennan-JobsCreditCreditFrances F. Denny for The New York Times
By Melanie Thernstrom
Sept. 4, 2018
SMALL FRY
By Lisa Brennan-Jobs
Illustrated. 381 pp. Grove Press. $26.
The myth of Steve Jobs: iconoclastic artistic genius, Nietzschean Übermensch, progenitor of the digital revolution who reshaped our domestic lives the same way that the titans of the Industrial Revolution reshaped cities and factories. Although dark tales about Jobs have appeared in biographies and movies, they have only burnished the legend: After all, the Übermensch is not a mensch. But “Small Fry,” an entrancing memoir by his first child, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, will force readers to grapple with whether Jobs was not merely unmenschlike but a monster. It is not a stretch to say that if you read this book, you will never think of Jobs the same way again.
Brennan-Jobs herself never addresses the question of his legacy; her book is written from the perspective of a child longing for a father. She grew up in Palo Alto with an impoverished single mother, Jobs’s high school girlfriend, Chrisann Brennan, and had moved 13 times by the time she was 7 — a bohemian existence so chaotic that the Humane Society rejected their application for a kitten. (Lisa had to settle for mice.) Yet all the while, just around the corner, was the increasingly famous, wealthy father who refused to parent her.
At a birthday party for her younger half sister Eve, a guest asks Lisa who she is. Eve responds, “She was daddy’s mistake.”
“You shouldn’t say that,” Lisa whispers in Eve’s ear, reeling. It is the terrible motif of her life. For the first three years after her birth, Jobs denies paternity (and later, when she is an adult, he erases her existence again, describing himself to magazines and on his company’s website as the father of only her three half siblings). Chrisann also makes her feel like a mistake, repeatedly intimating that being a single mother is too difficult for her. By kindergarten, Lisa had internalized her unwantedness and begun “to feel there was something gross and shameful about me,” as if she were “wormy inside, like I’d caught whatever disease or larvae were passed through raw eggs and flour when I snuck raw cookie dough.”
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Brennan-Jobs is a deeply gifted writer. Before I read her book, I wondered if it had been ghostwritten, like many such books. But from the striking opening — in which Lisa is drifting around her father’s house when he is dying of cancer, snubbed by everyone and pinching trifles from different rooms to appease her sense of exclusion — it is clear that this is a work of uncanny intimacy. Her inner landscape is depicted in such exquisitely granular detail that it feels as if no one else could possibly have written it. Indeed, it has that defining aspect of a literary work: the stamp of a singular sensibility. In the fallen world of kiss-and-tell celebrity memoirs, this may be the most beautiful, literary and devastating one ever written.
Although Lisa felt loved by her mother, Chrisann was intermittently negligent and abusive. Suffering from depression, she would talk of suicide, spend whole days shut in her room and — by middle school — draw Lisa into hours of violent argument every night. Under pressure from Lisa’s school (which threatened to call social services, Lisa later learns), Steve agrees to take her in. She is overjoyed. As a child, she had pictured herself as a princess in disguise; finally, she imagines, legitimacy will be bestowed on her and she will take her place alongside her stepmother, Laurene, and baby brother, Reed, in their “fairy-tale,” faux-English country cottage mansion adorned by apple trees where fans cluster on the sidewalk.
But Lisa’s role turns out to be more like Cinderella’s, as neighbors — who come to play fairy godparents in her life — observe. (These neighbors take her in when her father expels her, and pay for her senior year at Harvard when he refuses.) Steve demands absolute fealty: He pressures Lisa to change her last name to his (she adds it with a hyphen) and insists that she not see her mother for six months. Lisa cries herself to sleep out of grief and guilt about abandoning Chrisann. She is made to wash the dishes by hand each night (Steve refuses to repair the broken dishwasher), to sleep in a chilly room (he also refuses to repair the heater) and to serve as an on-call babysitter for her brother. When her father and Laurene invite her to join them at a fancy wedding in Napa, she is thrilled. She pictures it as her coming-out ball, where she will “be included, in public, part of the family! The daughter, the sister.” She’ll need to buy nylons and pick out a dress, she thinks, in “an ecstasy of decision-making.” But when they get to the hotel room and she starts to change, they let her know she needn’t bother: She won’t be attending the ceremony. They have brought her to babysit for her brother.
Her father goes to great lengths to make her feel excluded when he is with Laurene. In one of the book’s most grotesque scenes, he grabs Laurene when the three of them are sitting in the garden and starts making out with her, undulating and “moaning theatrically” as he puts his hand up her skirt and Laurene opens her legs to reveal “a scythe of her white cotton underwear.” (A startling metaphor: Has underwear ever been figured as a scythe before?) When Lisa gets up to leave, he forces her to stay and watch, telling her, “we’re having a family moment” and “it’s important that you try to be part of this family.”
The scene feels to her more like “a performance” than an expression of uncontrolled lust — a performance Steve inflicted on her with a previous girlfriend as well. He also likes to joke by simulating sex and frequently engaging her in sexual conversation. One morning, he looks up from his newspaper to ask if she masturbates. Chrisann’s own memoir, “The Bite in the Apple” (2013), describes her horror when she arrives at Steve’s house to find him joking about sex between his prepubescent daughter and random boys. Lisa’s face, Chrisann writes, is “blank with pain and confusion.”
The reader is left to wonder whether Lisa is fully aware of just how disturbing this dynamic was. In another instance that would have benefited from perspective, she recounts a moment when she is 14 and tries to be close to Steve by sitting, uneasily, on his lap, trembling with fear, excitement and a “quaking electric love,” wishing they could relate like normal daughters and fathers. At one point she calls his behavior “inappropriate,” but at the end of the book she assures him that he had been “good about sex.” Was she trying to appease the aggressor, or does she not understand the scenes she has shown us?
Desperate to win over her stepmother, Lisa fawns over Laurene, hoping her “servile quality would ignite compassion, pity or love” and she would become “the long-lost daughter they might want.” She comes to the painful realization that Laurene — whom she perceived as her “last resort” — would not “inhabit the role I’d assigned her, that she was not here to fix my father for me.”
Lisa’s memoir stands in marked contrast to previous representations of Steve and the Jobs family. Laurene, Lisa’s half siblings and her aunt the novelist Mona Simpson have said in a statement to The Times that the book “differs dramatically from our memories of those times,” and “the portrayal of Steve is not the husband and father we knew.” Readers will need to decide for themselves how to judge conflicting accounts. The portrait of Laurene as a stepmother certainly diverges from her public reputation as a philanthropist and devoted mother. “Steve Jobs,” Walter Isaacson’s best-selling authorized biography, lionizes Jobs and depicts Laurene and her children in glowing terms, while painting Lisa in a largely unflattering light. Learning Lisa’s perspective for the first time, and being confronted with instance after instance of her father’s sadism, readers may find themselves reeling, thinking: What is wrong with this man?
As a writer, however, she chooses not to speculate on the nature of her father’s pathology, but instead focuses on her childhood experience — trying to understand why gestures of nurturing, approval or warmth are inevitably followed by acts of aggression, cruelty and humiliation. At a resort in Hawaii, she watches with horror as Steve taunts a parrot, holding forth a bread crumb only to snatch it away when the bird reaches for it. The bird does not, cannot, learn: Again and again, it reaches.
Occasionally, her father tosses her a crumb. Lisa captures her father’s mystique, the frisson she felt from seeing his picture in magazines, the effect of dropping his name and the way he created the impression that knowing him was a privilege — albeit a dangerous one. She recalls the way he would pull up to her mother’s small house in his black Porsche convertible, “thickening the air with excitement,” and take her roller-skating around the neighborhood. Sometimes he would force her to ride on his shoulders; he would lurch, terrifyingly, and they would both fall — an apt metaphor for the relationship. He would tell Chrisann, “You know she’s more than half me,” and Chrisann would tell Lisa that her father had “fallen in love” with her again. Then he would disappear.
Children inhabit the world more sensually than adults, but the memories of how things looked and smelled and sounded fade, and childhood memoirs often suffer from a deficit of such details. Brennan-Jobs details scenes as richly as a prose poem, conjuring the way rare moments of connection with her father transformed the landscape. One weekend morning as they took a walk, he expounded on his belief that the two of them were West Coast people. East Coast people, he said, were phonies and lacked “the quality of holy surrender we had because of these fragrant hills that smelled of pepper and eucalyptus, all this watery sunlight.” Torn between her parents’ worlds, Lisa “bobbed between different ideas of myself,” but at such times she felt she was her “father’s confidante, the one like him, true like jeans, the Stanford hills, Bob Dylan.”
It is the longing of every person to see her parents as people, for their parents to step out of their roles and reveal their true, baffling selves, like the couple Woody Allen stops on the street in “Annie Hall” who explain the success of their relationship: “I’m very shallow and empty”; “And I’m exactly the same way!” In one of the climactic scenes in “Small Fry,” precisely this kind of moment occurs. When Lisa is in high school, she persuades Steve and Laurene to accompany her to her psychiatrist for a meeting, where she confesses: “I’m feeling terribly alone.” Then she bursts into tears, which she hoped “would soften them.”
Laurene finally breaks the silence. “We’re just cold people,” she announces. Lisa is stunned. Laurene had said it “dryly, like a clarification.” Lisa had imagined that she “could shame them for being cold and absent. Now I was the one who was ashamed, for ignoring the simple truth. How obvious it was — they were just cold people!”
Yet, on Steve’s deathbed, the moment she has been waiting for all her life finally arrives. He asks her to visit on a weekend when her stepmother and siblings are away, and tells her he regretted the father he had been. “I want to say something: You were not to blame,” he tells her, sobbing. “I wish I could go back.” The apology feels like “cool water on a burn.” But when Laurene returns and Lisa tries to tell her about it — how momentous it felt — Laurene’s response is curt: “I don’t believe in deathbed revelations.”
We all have our own myth of Steve Jobs: surges of love, gratitude or awe for the man who gave us the tools we use to express ourselves. At his memorial service, and in the years that followed, strangers would burden Lisa with their Jobs legends — people she had never met praising her father, “asserting a claim” that Steve was “like a father” to them. She knows they want her to “confirm him as the ur-father. His great greatness.” Bearing his last name, yet forced to live under the crushing reality of his emotional deficits, Lisa was, in some sense, uniquely deprived of the myth. But after Steve dies, Chrisann insists that she can sense his spirit, telling Lisa that he’s following her around and he’s overjoyed to be with her: “He wants to be with you so much he’s padding around behind you … he’s delighted just watching you butter a piece of toast.”
“I didn’t believe it,” Lisa writes in the book’s perfect last line, “but I liked thinking it anyway.”
The ultimate question for all of us is what image of our father we carry forward: our own ur-father, the internalized figure we choose to keep. Having sifted through the complex reality of her experiences, Lisa is finally free to claim her own myth: the fantasy of the father she longed for that allowed her to survive the father she had.
Melanie Thernstrom is the author of, among other books, “The Dead Girl,” a memoir; and “The Pain Chronicles: Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering.”
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A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 9, 2018, on Page 12 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Malware. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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