Small Fry

Money is everywhere in "Small Fry" and almost never where you'd expect. Lisa moved thirteen times before she was in her teens, following her mother through rentals and borrowed rooms, sometimes lit by candles because the power was off. Meanwhile her father lived in grand, half-empty houses — famously under-furnished, a mattress on the floor, a single lamp, a BMW in the drive. The wealth was colossal and rationed like a scarce resource. He questioned the price of things. He could refuse to pay her college tuition and then, later, relent.

The scenes that stay with readers are domestic and small. A request for money met with a lecture. A moment when she asks, as a teenager, whether she can have his old Porsche when he's done with it, and he tells her she'll get nothing — a line delivered flatly, cruelly, and never quite retracted. Warmth arrives too, unpredictably: a bike ride, a shared silence, an evening when he was tender and funny and entirely hers. The unpredictability is the point. She learned to track his moods the way you'd learn a difficult climate.

For a period in her adolescence, Lisa lived with her father and his wife, Laurene Powell, and their growing family. It should have been the reconciliation the story seemed to be building toward. Instead it delivered a subtler ache. She was inside the house now, present at the meals, folded into a family — and still often made to feel provisional, a guest who might overstay. There were rules about affection, moments withheld, a sense that belonging was conditional and could be revoked.

Some of the book's most quietly wounding passages come from these years: the family therapy sessions where she pleaded for a warmth that wouldn't come, the small refusals, the way a request to be told she was loved could be turned into a negotiation. Jobs was capable of saying devastating things and then behaving as though nothing had happened. Brennan-Jobs records them, but she also records the reconciliations, the late tenderness, the fact that she kept coming back and so, in his way, did he.

Steve Jobs has been written about exhaustively — the authorized biography, the business histories, the eulogies. Those books mostly ask what he built and how he changed the world. "Small Fry" asks a different, smaller, harder question: what was he like across a kitchen from a child who needed him? That shift in scale is the whole achievement. A biography aggregates a life into significance. A memoir refuses the aggregation and insists on the individual afternoon, the specific sentence, the exact quality of a silence.

This is why the book unsettled some of Jobs's admirers, and even some of his family. It doesn't argue that he was a bad man; argument isn't its mode. It simply records, in a daughter's voice, moments that no admiring account had room for. And by staying at that human scale, it does something the myth-making cannot: it returns Jobs to the category of person, capable of ordinary cruelty and ordinary tenderness, rather than leaving him as an icon whose flaws get folded into genius.

The book ends where a person's story often ends, with a death and an incomplete peace. Jobs died in 2011, and the apologies that came late did not undo what came before, nor were they nothing. Brennan-Jobs leaves the account exactly that unbalanced, because that is how it was. The girl who tracked her father's moods like weather grew into the writer who could finally name each front and pressure system, without flinching and without vengeance.