As a child, Lisa Brennan-Jobs wanted nothing more than for people to know who her dad was, but now she’s trying to sculpt her own public identity while reconciling with the fact that no story about her can be complete without also talking about her famous father, Apple founder Steve Jobs.
In the opening of "Small Fry," Brennan-Jobs describes how her father, who vehemently denied paternity of her, was eventually forced by the San Mateo County District Attorney to take a DNA test to prove he was indeed her father. After the test, she notes that Jobs’ lawyers rushed to close the case ending with a judge determining Jobs needed to pay $500 a month to Brennan-Jobs’ mother, Chrisann. Four days later Apple went public and Jobs was worth more than $200 million. Though readers will most certainly be turned off by Jobs’ treatment of his daughter — taking her on a trip to Napa Valley just so she could babysit her half-brother, telling her as a child that she should expect nothing from him, and how her mother and her had to comfort her young cousin after Jobs’ publicly berated her for ordering a hamburger — Brennan-Jobs says that next to these moments were also powerful moments where she felt he tried his hardest to be a better father to her.
“My father abandoned us when I was quite young, and didn’t help out financially — certainly not emotionally — and then he decided to come back; and that decision, I don’t know how he made it, but he started coming back ... he was still a very young man, so he made a sort of big decision and he was not only a young man, but I also think in many ways awkward and didn’t know how to be with a child,” Jobs said in an interview with Boston Public Radio. “Going back and looking at this story that we had together, I thought ‘Oh!’ and he wasn’t good at [parenting], and he kept on kind of failing, and he kept on trying, and we had some really meaningful times together.”
But to consider "Small Fry" a companion piece to the Steve Jobs’ mythos is a disservice to the rich portrait Brennan-Jobs paints of the trials of single-parenting, a Silicon Valley that’s free of tech-bros and Teslas, and her own coming of age story in the shadow of one of the most influential people of the 20th century. Much of Brennan-Jobs’ focus is on her relationship with her mother, where Brennan-Jobs’ is forced to face the reality that her mother is a struggling adult, and as her child, she is placing a burden on her both financially and socially.
In one moving scene, Chrisann begins to sob and exclaim that she wants a different life, while driving the two home in pounding rain, all while a young Brennan-Jobs’ silently came to terms with the role she’s unintentionally played in her mother’s unhappiness.
Perhaps the true strength of "Small Fry " is Brennan-Jobs’ ability to tell a story without imposing the lens of hindsight to justify or explain why her father, her mother or her acted the way they did in the past. For her part, Brennan-Jobs also describes how despite her father’s lack of interest in her, she would frequently disobey her mother and use her lineage to her advantage whether that was making more friends at school or impressing the clerk at a local art supply store. She doesn’t whitewash how she was rude to the man who would become a surrogate father figure to her, despite the overt kindness he showed her family. In high school, after she decided to leave her mother to live with her father, Chrisanne bemoans how her daughter is just as bad as Steve Jobs and his other family, causing Brennan-Jobs to stand up and leave in the middle of their reunion. It’s these raw moments that not only drive the narrative forward, but also make Brennan-Jobs a reliable narrator and thus giving her the control of her own story which she’s striving for.
Apple acolytes who are hoping to scrape up more information about Steve Jobs or find an insider account of the inner workings of the company will be disappointed. "Small Fry" is not about Steve Jobs and it’s not a book about Apple, rather it's an intimate, heartbreaking and often-times funny story of one young woman’s journey to discover her identity and voice.
