“Three months before he died, I began to steal things from my father’s house. I wandered around barefoot and slipped objects into my pockets,” Lisa Brennan-Jobs writes in an excerpt from her upcoming (September 4, 2018) book, Small Fry for Vanity Fair. “After stealing each item, I felt sated. I promised myself that this would be the last time. But soon the urge to take something else would arrive again like thirst.”
“Later, I would put everything back,” Brennan-Jobs writes. “For the past year, I’d visited for a weekend every other month or so. I’d given up on the possibility of a grand reconciliation, the kind in the movies, but I kept coming anyway.”
—
“In the spring of 1978, when my parents were 23, my mother gave birth to me on their friend Robert’s farm in Oregon, with the help of two midwives. The labor and delivery took three hours, start to finish. My father arrived a few days later. ‘It’s not my kid,’ he kept telling everyone at the farm, but he’d flown there to meet me anyway. I had black hair and a big nose, and Robert said, ‘She sure looks like you,'” Brennan-Jobs writes. “My parents took me out into a field, laid me on a blanket, and looked through the pages of a baby-name book. He wanted to name me Claire. They went through several names but couldn’t agree. They didn’t want something derivative, a shorter version of a longer name.”
“What about Lisa?” my mother finally said.
“Yes. That one,” he said happily.
He left the next day.
“Isn’t Lisa short for Elizabeth?” I asked my mother. “No. We looked it up. It’s a separate name.” “And why did you let him help name me when he was pretending he wasn’t the father?” “Because he was your father,” she said.
—
“Hey, you know that computer, the Lisa? Was it named after me?” I asked many years later when I was in high school and splitting my time between my parents’ houses. I tried to sound like I was curious, nothing more.
If he would just give me this one thing.
“Nope.” His voice was clipped, dismissive. Like I was fishing for a compliment. “Sorry, kid.”
—
We had lunch on a large covered balcony overlooking the sea. Bono asked my father about the beginning of Apple… Then Bono asked, “So, was the Lisa computer 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.
“I thought so,” Bono said.
“Yup,” my father said.
I studied my father’s face. What had changed? Why had he admitted it now, after all these years? Of course, it was named after me, I thought then. His lie seemed preposterous now. I felt a new power that pulled my chest up.
Tons more in the full article – most highly recommended – here.
MacDailyNews Take: Obviously, Small Fry will be a must-must-must-read.
SEE ALSO:
Chrisann Brennan: Steve Jobs was a haunted house of brokenness; cold, ruthless, and obsessive – October 4, 2015
Steve Jobs’ ex Chrisann Brennan reveals their explosive relationship in new memoir – October 15, 2013
Thanks for pointing this article out. I enjoyed the read, and even better that Lisa wrote it! Many of us knew that Steve was far from perfect, and difficult to work with.
One truth us “old timers” knew many years ago, Lisa was his child.
Geez, what a dick
Yeah, that was one side of him. He was driven, and that made him selfish, and often cruel. It’s a mixed bag with Steve. I have sympathy for the people he hurt, but I still have admiration and respect for what he accomplished and the drive and vision that he possessed and utilized to its full potential. He accepted being recognized as “a dick”; he was on a mission and people that didn’t advance his immediate goals were expendable. He was a dick that got things done in ways that changed society as a whole.
Gossopy.
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What a strange man
How is this a secret though?
Or, he couldn’t admit that it was NOT named after her. Sorry. What’s he gonna say in front of his child?
I give people a lot of leeway in judgements, except when it comes to their own children! Kids need a safe, secure home, not just dollars.
Pretty much a deadbeat dad, who only paid support when he was forced to, the cheapskate bastard. Guess she got the last laugh with his death.