Lisa Brennan-Jobs Books In Order

Publication Order of Memoirs

Lisa Brennan-Jobs is an American author nonfiction books. She is the daughter of Steve Jobs and for many years her father- Jobs- denied paternity which led to various media reports and a legal case in the early days of Apple. The father and daughter relationship was at last reconciled, and Jobs accepted his paternity. Brennan-Jobs has worked as a magazine writer and journalist.

Apple Lisa, an early Apple computer is named after Brennan-Jobs, and she’s been featured in a couple of films and biographies including the biopics Steve Jobs, Pirates of Silicon Valley, and Jobs. A fictionalized version of Brennan-Jobs is the main character A Regular Guy, a novel by Mona Simpson’s.

Lisa Brennan-Jobs is best known for her debut book Small Fry published in 2018. Small Fry is a poignant narrative of a childhood spent between two flawed but remarkable homes. Wise, scrappy and funny, Lisa offers an unforgettable guide through her parent’s fantastic and dissimilar worlds. Small Fry is a fascinating book by one of the promising literary voice of the 21st century.

Small Fry

In Small Fry, Steve Jobs, the man whom the world respected thanks to his innovations in the computer and smartphone industry comes across as a Jerk. His daughter Lisa Brennan forgives him, but should the world forgive him as well?

When Steve Jobs told his daughter that the Apple computer named Apple Lisa wasn’t named after her- it was not a bad lie to a young girl, Lisa insists, but instead, he was teaching his daughter not to ride on his coattails.

When her father didn’t install heat in her room, Lisa insists that he wasn’t being callous but was instilling a value system in her. When her dying father told her that she smelled like a toilet, she wasn’t hated, but instead, he was honest as Ms Brennan confirms.

It’s unusual to write such a gut-wrenching memoir with such condemning details but still, insist that these details are not damning at all. However, that’s what Lisa Brennan-Jobs exactly did in her memoir, Small Fry.

Thanks to dozen other films and biographies, Apple fans already know the general outlines of the author’s early life. Steve Jobs fathered her at the age of 23 but then denied paternity regardless of the DNA match. She was given little in emotional and financial support even as Steve Jobs became a god in the computing era. Small Fry is Lisa Brennan’s effort to regain her story for herself.

The setting of Lisa’s raw depictions of life with and without her father is 1980’s Silicon Valley where hippies and artists mixed with tech gurus, ideas how to shape the future were born, and a fountain of billions of dollars was starting to hit the landscape. Brennan-Jobs lived her childhood on welfare together with her mother, Chrisann Brennan and a “teenage-hood” sheltered in her father’s wealth.

In many passages of Small Fry, Steve Jobs is ferocious to both his daughter and those around her. In the days before the publication of the book, Brennan-Job was fearful that readers would perceive her book as a tell-all expose rather than nuanced portrait of her family. She worried that people would react about a well-known man’s legacy instead of a young woman’s story and that she would again be erased like she was in her family. Upon its release the received positive critics with many readers terming it as a memoir of uncommon grace, spare elegance, maturity that leaves the reader with a kind, loving remembrance and a lasting impression of a kindhearted, resilient woman who’s at peace with her past.

Lisa Brennan-Jobs has made peace with her father even in death. However, what the tricky part is that she wants her readers to forgive Steve Jobs too, but she understands that could be a problem as well.

After college, Lisa left home to work in finance in Italy and London, and she later shifted into the design, freelance writing for literary journals and magazine. Now at the age of 40, she’s avoided publicity; she’s never been profiled and has always eluded many of her father’s chroniclers with one exception, Aaron Sorkin who referred to her as a heroine in his 2015 Steve Jobs biopic.

In an interview with the New York Times, Lisa Brennan claims that she didn’t trust Walter Isaacson, the man who wrote the mega-selling definitive bio of her father in 2011. She claims she’s portrayed as the bad of the story. Small Fry memoir seeks to address some of the shame in Walters’s story by telling the tale of how her childhood unfolded, the key characters in her life and why everything in her past happened. Brennan-Jobs made a trip to Silicon Valley and interviewed members of her family, her mother’s ex-lovers, her friends, and of course her father’s ex-girlfriend. In her childhood, Silicon Valley was full of garage hackers and all green with eucalyptus. Now, this is one of the best wealth-creation machines in the world, and Steve Jobs remains one of its iconic heroes.

Lisa Brennan-Jobs began working on a story that would later become Small Fry after her father’s death in 2011. Years into writing, Lisa felt rushed by Penguin Press (her publisher), but she feared being made to take advantage of her dad’s legacy. She opted to switch publishers, one whom she could work with and also give her enough time to complete her work. Luckily she found Grove Press.

Overall, Small Fry tells the story of how Steve Jobs gradually took a bigger interest in his daughter, coming over to her house and taking her skating. Lisa Brennan moved in with his father for a time when she was in high school when her mom was struggling financially. Her father had weird demands on what being a member of Job’s family entailed. The neighbours next door were so concerned, and one night when her father was out, they moved Lisa into their house. Against her father’s wishes, the neighbors paid for her college fee- but Mr Jobs later paid them back.

Small Fry portrays Lisa’s mother as a free spirit who nurtured her beloved daughter creativity- but could be hot-tempered, mercurial and at times neglectful.