Vanity Fair today has published a brief excerpt from Lisa Brennan-Jobs’ upcoming memoir ‘Small Fry,’ which is set to be released next month. In the memoir, she reflects on her final days with her father, and what it was like growing around him…
Brennan-Jobs describes being around Steve Jobs during his final days, writing that she would take items from his house to have things to remember him by:
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 in celadon blue, a bottle of nail polish, a pair of worn patent-leather ballet slippers, and four faded white pillowcases the color of old teeth.
She also describes how Jobs was regularly accompanied by a Buddhist monk during those times:
Segyu Rinpoche stood beside him. He’d been around recently when I came to visit. A short Brazilian man with sparkling brown eyes, the Rinpoche was a Buddhist monk with a scratchy voice who wore brown robes over a round belly. We called him by his title. Near us, a black canvas bag of nutrients hummed with a motor and a pump, the tube disappearing somewhere under my father’s sheets.
When she was younger, Brennan-Jobs describes her father’s work on the Lisa – which as she notes, turned out to be a “commercial failure.”
During the time my mother was pregnant, my father started work on a computer that would later be called the Lisa. It was the precursor to the Macintosh, the first mass-market computer with an external mouse—the mouse as large as a block of cheese. But it was too expensive, a commercial failure; my father began on the team working for it, but then started working against it, competing against it, on the Mac team. The Lisa computer was discontinued, the 3,000 unsold computers later buried in a landfill in Logan, Utah.
During this time, Brennan-Jobs explains that her mother was on welfare payments as Steve Jobs wasn’t around to help as he didn’t accept that he was the father until she was three years old.
She goes on to explain how excited she was to have Jobs – who she described as “famous” – as her father. “He invented the personal computer. He lives in a mansion and drives a Porsche convertible. He buys a new one every time it gets a scratch,” she says he told her friends at the time.
The full excerpt is definitely worth a read and offers an intimate look at the father-daughter relationship – and, at times, the lack thereof – between the famed Apple CEO and Lisa Brennan-Jobs.
Small Fry is set to be released on September 4th and can be pre-ordered on Amazon here.
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