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Small Fry, in detail
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.
The class dimension of the book is quietly devastating. Brennan-Jobs grew up knowing her father was wealthy, living in some material precarity with her mother, and navigating the cognitive dissonance of that position throughout her childhood. When she eventually moved in with her father and his family, the wealth was present in ways that highlighted rather than resolved the earlier exclusion. The book is excellent on the specific strange position of a child who is both claimed and not claimed, both inside and outside a powerful family's circle.
Small Fry is not a takedown, though it has been received as one in some quarters. Brennan-Jobs gives her father credit where she thinks it's due. But it is a book that refuses to perform forgiveness or reconciliation that wasn't felt, and that refusal gives it an integrity that many celebrity-adjacent memoirs lack. It is one of the finer literary memoirs of the past decade.
The big ideas
- 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.
