The late Steve Jobs might’ve been a visionary for creating Apple, but at home he wasn’t quite as inspirational — or loving at all. At least that’s according to Small Fry, a memoir by Jobs’ estranged daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs.
“For him, I was a blot on a spectacular ascent,” Brennan-Jobs wrote in the book, out September 4. “As our story did not fit with the narrative of greatness and virtue he might have wanted for himself. My existence ruined his streak.”
Who is Lisa Brennan-Jobs? Here’s everything you need to know about Steve Job’s first daughter.
Steve Jobs and Lisa Brennan-Jobs’ mother were high school sweethearts
Jobs and Chrisann Brennan were together from high school and their relationship was on and off throughout the 1970s — and Chrisann even worked at Apple for a period of time. Their relationship ended for good before Brennan-Jobs was born in May 1978.
While I’m overjoyed by how people seem to be receiving the excerpt, I do worry some (especially if they read excerpts of the excerpt) might buy the book expecting a tell-all rather than a coming-of-age story about a girl and her family in California.https://t.co/IS7MkciOWb pic.twitter.com/JF96XhkziH
— Lisa Brennan-Jobs (@LisaBrennanJobs) August 3, 2018
He publicly denied paternity, claiming that “28% of the male population of the United States could be the father” of Lisa Brennan-Jobs.
According to Chrisann, Jobs “started to seed people with the notion that I slept around and he was infertile, which meant that this could not be his child.”
A later paternity test found that he was the father and was ordered to pay back child support.
“I was required to take a DNA test,” Brennan-Jobs wrote in the book. ” The tests were new then, and when the results came back, they gave the odds that we were related as the highest the instruments could measure at the time: 94.4 percent. The court required my father to cover welfare back payments, child-support payments of $385 per month, which he increased to $500, and medical insurance until I was 18.”
The Apple Lisa computer was named after Lisa-Brennan-Jobs
The unsuccessful Apple Lisa computer was named after Jobs’ daughter, but he denied it.
“The idea that he’d named the failed computer after me was woven in with my sense of self, even if he did not confirm it, and I used this story to bolster myself when, near him, I felt like nothing,” she wrote.
She once asked him if the computer was named after her. “‘Nope.’ His voice was clipped, dismissive. Like I was fishing for a compliment. ‘Sorry, kid.'”
He later revealed to U2’s Bono that it was named after her.
“There was a pause. I braced myself — prepared for his answer. “My father hesitated, looked down at his plate for a long moment, and then back at Bono. ‘Yeah, it was,’ he said. I sat up in my chair,” she wrote.
“‘I thought so,’ Bono said. “‘Yup,’ my father said.”
Lisa Brennan-Jobs had a complicated relationship with her father
Jobs eventually started spending time with Brennan-Jobs after the DNA test was finalized, but he once admonished her when she asked for his Porsche when he was finished with it.
“‘Absolutely not,’ he said in such a sour, biting way that I knew I’d made a mistake,” she wrote.
“I wished I could take it back. We pulled up to the house and he turned off the engine. Before I made a move to get out he turned to face me. ‘You’re not getting anything,'” he said. “‘You understand? Nothing. You’re getting nothing.’ Did he mean about the car, something else, bigger? I didn’t know. His voice hurt — sharp, in my chest.”
Steve Jobs once Lisa Brennan-Jobs that she ‘smelled like a toilet’
Brennan-Jobs visited her father often before his 2011 death from pancreatic cancer. During one memorable visit, Jobs told his eldest child that she smelled.
“Before I said good-bye, I went to the bathroom to mist one more time,” she wrote. “The spray was natural, which meant that over the course of a few minutes it no longer smelled sharp like roses, but fetid and stinky like a swamp, although I didn’t realise it at the time.”
“As I came into his room, he was getting into a standing position. I watched him gather both his legs in one arm, twist himself 90 degrees by pushing against the headboard with the other arm, and then use both arms to hoist his own legs over the edge of the bed and onto the floor. When we hugged, I could feel his vertebrae, his ribs. He smelled musty, like medicine sweat.”
“‘I’ll be back soon,’ I said. We detached, and I started walking away,” she wrote. “‘Lis?'”
“‘Yeah?'”
“‘You smell like a toilet.'”
