There’s two sides to every person.
As such, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, a daughter of the longtime Apple CEO Steve Jobs, has published an excerpt from her coming memoir, “Small Fry,” which contains heartbreaking details about her difficult relationship with her father.
This marks the first time Jobs’ daughter has written in depth about her father, who initially denied paternity and refused to pay child-support payments to her mother, Chrisann Brennan.
Jobs died in 2011 at 56 of complications from pancreatic cancer.
The book’s excerpt, published in Vanity Fair’s September issue, opens with a literary rendering of Jobs’ final days, presided over by a Buddhist monk who instructed a visiting Lisa to “touch his feet.” Jobs converted to Buddhism at a young age.
Brennan-Jobs describes visiting her sick father every weekend and trying to fit in around her stepmother, Laurene Powell, and her three half-siblings.
“I had given up on the possibility of a grand reconciliation, the kind in the movies, but I kept coming anyway,” she wrote.
The work also details how Jobs’ lawyers insisted on finalizing child-support and other payments On December 8th, 1980, only four days before Apple went public and Jobs became extremely wealthy.
The book also covers how Brennan-Jobs believed that her father replaced his Porsche every time it had a scratch and asking whether she could have one when he got rid of it.
“You’re not getting anything,” she said he responded. “You understand? Nothing. You’re getting nothing.”
Jobs is also described as not being “generous with money, or food, or words” and how Brennan-Jobs didn’t feel she had a normal relationship with her father, despite her desire to be closer to him.
“For him, I was a blot on a spectacular ascent, as our story did not fit with the narrative of greatness and virtue he might have wanted for himself,” she wrote. “My existence ruined his streak. For me, it was the opposite: The closer I was to him, the less I would feel ashamed; he was part of the world, and he would accelerate me into the light.”
Finally, the excerpt described how Jobs denied that the Apple Lisa computer was named after her, although Jobs later stated to U2 frontman Bono that the computer was in fact named after her on a later family holiday.
The full excerpt is linked below on the Vanity Fair website and may give a more fleshed out description as to one of the most evocative and at times controversial business leaders of any age.
Via Business Insider and Vanity Fair