Lisa Brennan-Jobs on Growing Up in the Shadow of Steve Jobs | The New Yorker

[Music] Lisa Brennan Josh you've written a memoir with all its personality and details and peculiarity and it's not to be mistaken for a biography of Steve Jobs and yet and yet he's your father and as very much at the center of the book as are you and I want to start at the beginning of things and have you read from the beginning of the book of you would 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 I took blush toothpaste two chipped finger bowls and sell it on blew a bottle of nail polish a pair of worn patent leather ballet slippers and four faded white pillowcases the color of old teeth 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 you know in your book Steve Jobs as the father often the missing father the father that rejects you for a long time much later it invites you in there are moments of real cruelty but you begin this book in the way that you do why because it makes me an active participant in the book one thing that happened when I started writing as I was disappearing in the pages I was writing about my parents and different things that had happened and I couldn't other people who read it said I can't quite locate you at some point I read this boy's life again this is Tobias Wolff so pious yeah and I realized that every time he was devious I loved him more the worse he was the more I adored him so with that license or with that new idea I found a new freedom to try and figure out where I had participated in my own life and and then and more where I'd been kind of bad yeah what are what is the most daunting aspect of setting out to write this book and you're in your 30s your father occupies a space in the popular imagination of a creator giant you walk down the street you see iPhone after iPhone after iPhone over there there's an iMac it's everywhere it's no escaping it and yet your vantage point is entirely different how do you process that in literary terms as a part of the book I wanted to write this book I even though like despite the fact that there's this really famous person in my family I wanted to write a coming-of-age story about a girl growing up in California in the 80s and 90s because I felt like if I got into it if enough if I got deep enough into it there was it was a universal story when you read somebody else's memoir who's in their late 30s and they're talking about when they were six or seven no matter how do we understand that as opposed to you know journalism or biography or scholarship right yeah how do we read that I feel like it's quite true I keep on getting notes from people who are in the book saying oh my god this is this is completely accurate but I felt for a long time and I think that a lot of people can come out with their first book and it has a lot of issues with it a lot of problems a lot of flaws maybe and I felt that this one to some degree I had to be it had to be less impeachable so that it would be worthy of the extra attention particularly in the first half of the book there's a great deal of cruelty some of it mindless some of it you ascribe to immaturity on his part but it's painful to read what was that like to re-experience everyday over your desk have this thing with memoir where you're going back and you're you're writing about it again and you're pulled back into these feelings and these times in order to write about them but on the other side at the end of the day I got to put down the pen and then go back to my life so I got to be I mean it's like the fantasy of of control right I got to mastery of the past right so I cut to go back and live in the past and elongate the good moments and maybe even elongate the bad moments to really figure out what they meant to me and suffer through them but I still had control over them and I had perspective control I could see them from the point of view of an adult and a child I was no longer just the child multiple perspective about that with my mother in the car I think I'm three or four and my mother who has read the article in Time magazine that says my father kind of said she'd slept around so who knows if he's the father yeah and she'd read this article and I had been devastating and we had no money and we're going back and it's raining and she's getting lost and she started screaming not at me but kind of at the world mm-hmm and she's screaming and she's she slams the - and and it was terrifying you know and and you remember this oh yeah yeah I remember it and I remember her yeah her feeling of hopelessness and her rage was terrifying and and then I write about this in the book and one of these you know sort of spiritual moments I wasn't sure whether to put in where I felt as if there was even at the time there was a presence in the back of the car kind of with us a good presence that couldn't interfere mhm in some way presence of your father no the presence of me writing the book like I said that that has been the feeling of going back and writing about childhood like I get to I get to go back and keep myself company I can't interfere but I'm a benevolent presence that then gets to keep this girl company as she travels all these and gets to say it's gonna be okay you're gonna be okay after your book was published Laurene Powell Jobs is his widow your stepmother and Mona Simpson you're on herself as a very good novelist issued a statement saying we're very carefully but I'll summarize it essentially we saw the past very differently which only stands to reason but clearly distanced themselves from your book in a in a very distinct way and they clearly were not happy about the book what do you think is at the center of their unhappiness of the book and how do you interpret their statement and criticism of it I think people have been writing about me a long time mm-hmm and so I know I know what it feels like to have a sort of a slice of your life represented by someone else and I know that it doesn't always feel very good so so so that was part of my trepidation and writing a book why did I have a right yeah but what I decided is that I did have the right to write my own story as accurately and as beautifully and as full of complexity as I could I had that right I decided you know other people might feel differently you have any relationship with Mona Simpson or learning Bella jobs at this point oh yeah I mean I I care about them and we'll see how Thanksgiving is how is it usually uh-huh it's pretty good okay so the Steve Jobs that comes out of popular imagination you get the sense of a visionary a certain kind of genius a really difficult difficult guy at times cruel self-centered the way that you just read he came off was from the other things that you read not from my book absolutely so and from and I'm curious to know I'm curious to know from you how was it different in my book the way that he came off then from these other radically different but mostly I'm seeing it through you right I thought so too yeah and how does he come off differently well there are moments where I I when I hit him more than before well because it's coming from a kid who's palpable on the page right so you can feel my you can feel the feelings more yeah yeah so it's like it's not necessarily a different character that I'm describing it's just that it's visceral now I think that's fair I've tried I've tried to understand why this reaction has been strong because I I feel like he's been so well covered it's like and that there are moments of joy tenderness sweetness care in this book between the two of us that are nowhere else right well maybe it's because people feel a certain sense of it's very strange to me in certain way relationship and ownership to this guy who's never been dead for a while yeah because he's in their pockets right he's on their desk maybe you should tell us about what happened when he was very sick we kind of had a Hollywood moment which I I didn't have enough I didn't have the guts to hope for the audacity to hope for tell us what happened what yeah I went back to see him before he died and he was he was apologizing fiercely for a weekend and crying and it was and saying I owe you one I owe you one which seemed like such an odd phrase it was I came at him woman I don't know I didn't know how to make sense of it really and the way that I made sense of it at the time and I think it was it was both on my part a kindness a sweetness which I really meant and a way to sort of underscore my frustration that I said to him if if we could do it again if there are multiple lifetimes and obviously we do not know then maybe next time we could be friends and what I meant was we were good as friends cuz we liked each other we would laugh together it was fun when we were friends who says thank you so much thank you thank you [Music]

Channel: The New Yorker

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Id: sYWa5TDN2Ao

Length: 11min 8sec (668 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 27 2018