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What it argues
Small Fry is Lisa Brennan-Jobs's memoir of growing up as the daughter Steve Jobs long refused to acknowledge. Brennan-Jobs was born in 1978, the same year as the Apple Lisa — whose name her father initially denied was connected to her. She grew up primarily with her mother, Chrisann Brennan, in modest circumstances around Palo Alto, while her father became one of the most powerful people in the technology industry a few miles away. The book covers her childhood and adolescence, the erratic relationship with a father who was by turns charming and dismissive, and her attempts to make sense of who she was in relation to him.
The writing is careful and specific in the way that distinguishes real literary memoir from the category as a whole. Brennan-Jobs renders the material world of 1980s California in close detail — houses, food, clothes, the specific texture of different homes she moved through — and uses those details to carry emotional weight that would be heavy-handed if stated directly. The scenes with her father are the most charged. Jobs could be genuinely present with her and then suddenly cold, acknowledging and then denying, generous and then withheld. She does not simplify him, and she doesn't simplify her own responses.
What it gets right
- 1.
A child's relationship with a parent who is intermittently present and withholding does not produce distance — it produces obsessive attention to the parent's moods and signals.
- 2.
Material wealth given without acknowledgment can function as its own form of deprivation. Brennan-Jobs's experience of her father's money was filtered through his refusal to fully recognize her.
- 3.
Silicon Valley's mythology of meritocracy and brilliance existed alongside ordinary human failures — narcissism, negligence, cruelty — that the mythology tends to excuse.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Lisa Brennan-Jobs is an American writer who grew up in Silicon Valley. She studied English at Harvard University and has written for Vogue, The Massachusetts Review, and other publications. Small Fry, published in 2018, is her first book. It received widespread critical praise and was named among the best books of 2018 by publications including Time, The New York Times, and The Guardian. She lives in New York.
