For most of her young life, Lisa Brennan-Jobs bounced back and forth between two very different homes—that of her mother, who raised Lisa alone for the first few years of her life and struggled to make ends meet; and that of her father, Steve Jobs, who lived exactly the way you’d expect the founder of a multimillion dollar tech company to but struggled to relate to the daughter he initially denied was his.
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Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio. In between visits, I saw my father all around New York. I saw him sitting in a movie theater, the exact curve of his neck to jaw to cheekbone. I saw him as I ran along the Hudson River in winter, sitting on a bench looking at the dock boats, and on my subway, revived the work, walking away on the platform through the crowd, thin men, olive skinned, fine fingered, slim wristed, double bearded, who at certain angles looked just like him. Each time I had to get closer to check my heart in my throat, even though I knew it could not possibly be him, because he was sick in bed in California. Before this, during years in which we hardly spoke, I had seen his picture everywhere. Seeing the pictures gave me a strange thing. The feeling was familiar to catching a glimpse of myself in a mirror across the room and thinking it was someone else, and then realizing it was my own faith Darry was peering up for magazines and newspapers and screens in whatever city I was in. That is my father, and no one knows it, but it's true. That's Lisa Brennan Jobs, reading from her first memoir, Small Fry. Lisa's story is both about having a secret and being a secret. What's your life like when your father, the father who initially did not believe you were his, The father who only reluctantly claimed you after he was forced to take a fraternity test, The father who kept you at arm's length all your life, is one of the most famous, powerful, and wealthiest men in the world. Here's just a bit more from Lisa before we dive into our conversation. I have a secret, I said to my new friends at school. I whispered it so they would see I was reluctant to mention it. The key I felt was to underplay. My father is Steve Jobs. Who is that? One asked, He's famous? I said, he invented the personal computer. He lives in a mansion and drives a Porsche convertible. He buys a new one every time I gets a scratch. The story had a film of unreality to it, as I said it, even to my own ears. I hadn't hung out with him that much, only a few skates and visits. I didn't have the clothes or the bike. Someone with a father like this would have. My last name was different from his. He even named a computer after me. I said to them, what computer. A girl named Elizabeth asked the Lisa. I said, a computer called the Lisa. She said, I never heard of it. It was ahead of its time. I used my mother's phrase, although I wasn't sure why it was ahead. He visited the personal computer later. But you can't tell anyone because if someone finds out, I could get kidnapped. I brought it up when I felt I needed to, waiting as long as I could, and then letting it burst forth. I don't remember feeling at a disadvantage with my friends who had others, only that there was at my fingertips another magical identity, an extra thing that started to itch and tangle when I felt small, and it was like a pressure building inside me. And then I had to find a way to say it. She had to find a way to say it. Isn't that what this show is all about? So many of us are trying to find a way to say it. Whatever it is, this thing that wasn't allowed to be spoken. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets. The secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. So I missed it a lot. Actually, the air in California and northern California knows of disks. They're towering and there's silvery, and they have these size in half moon knees that dangle down and shiver in the wind. And they have these beautiful kind of button shaped seeds that plunk on those ceilings and fall on the roads, and they are kind of silvery too, and perfumed. My mother was saying that they're not native to the area and that their roots systems are really shallow, so they can fall over. She said this when I was younger, and I I held onto this idea, and I remember when we would drive to the beach, which was up this curvy road all the way over the hills and then down to the Pacific Ocean. There was a line of eucalyptus trees, and every time we would have to go through that long tree lined road, I would hold my breath with terror that these trees would fall down on us. And then many years later said, oh, no, sweetheart, no trees falling very slowly, but anyway, the air smelled the people lift and danger. The earliest home I think I remember was this place as the sort of the batch house of the house in Memmo Park and no are remember being in a shower with my mother and she was the hot water and the cold water were coming on. We were alternating them for some reason, and she was yelling like closed poors, open pours, and I was yelling it with her, and I think there was a curtain, and then we would go outside. At that house there was theater. The house was small that there was quite the garden because the main house was surrounded by land. This house is a kind of house on spilt on a hill that was really falling apart a little bit, the one with the trellis roses, and there was ivy on one side where I would go and play beside the big oak tree on my own. Or was the boy who lived there with his mother also we were renting a room. And now that house has been all fixed up. It looks really nice because that doesn't look anymore like it's going to fall down the hill or like the wood is old. It looks like a shiny, polished version of its old self when we lived in a bunch of houses. I think I've removed searching times before I was seven, but by the time I was seven. What was it like to move thirteen times in the first seven years of your life? I mean both what was it like then? And like, how do you think about that now? It's hard to know what it was like then. I remember my mother being very sad. I think maybe she was probably depressed and probably just completely overwhelmed with our money less circumstances, and how she would kind of sit in one of these rooms in the dark, and I would feel embarrassed because in this one's house that we're moving into, it was our own house. We were the ones who had our name on the lease, and I remember the des fiction, oh my god, we're moving into a place that's just ours. And I also remember noticing that we really didn't have any furniture. So I had these moments of feeling a distance from my own circumstances and of irthing them, maybe because I've been to other people's houses. We lived at one place over the summer that was full of furniture. We stub led it from somewhere too was away, and they had a television, and I remember watching Jethany Street and they had so much furniture that right now, the way I imagine it was the kind of a hoarder's paradise, but in fact it might have just been a very well, normally furnished house. You know. It wasn't necessarily something I was looking at anthropologically, because it was my life and I was so young I didn't really know any different. And yet there were ploys when I remember thinking, oh, that's different than what might be normal. And I think that children will take these moments that are mysterious and sort of box them up for later. And I think that because I think during the process of writing a memoir it was it was an unboxing. In other words, the stories that I would remember, we're the ones that where things happened that does not make sense to me at the time, and that is why I had wrapped them up and saved them for all that time. One of these boxed up moments happens in a car after Lisa and her mom have taken a road trip to Harbor Hot Springs and everything that can possibly go wrong does. Her mother gets lost, the car breaks down. They're hungry, tired, and completely without resources, and her mother just loses it, completely loses it, and essentially has a nervous collapse right there in the car in front of her four year old daughter, in what must have been a frightening combination of terror and rage. There's this moment where you write, at the height of her hopelessness and noise, that felt a calm presence near us, even though I knew we were alone in the water. We held the car jerking, some benevolent presence that cared for us but could not interfere. Maybe sitting in the back seat, can you say more about that benevolent presence and whether that's something that kind of accompanied you at other times. You were very young when you had that thought, right, I think it was for And I talked to my mother about that later after I had written it. I was mentioning this moment you talked about in the car driving back from this little sort of break we took, driving back to our home. Oh my god, you know, we don't have money, we don't have to support There's a sense of shame in society for her role, and she feels as very acute way. She is a married woman with an illegitimate child, and she's thought that she would ever have thought of me in that way. But Reagan is talking about, well, her mother is and single mothers, and my father is saying that she essentially slept with lots of people, and she she hadn't and then it wasn't his kid, and you know, it's just shame upon Shane. And she had had her own test things in her childhood. And so she she's screaming kind of at the universe, but I'm there. And she said later when I asked her about it, that she she's had other moments like that before that on, but that at that moment she realized, oh, and he's just going to remember this later. You know, there was I was past the veil where memories disappear, and oh god, I remember being terrified, and I remember if I didn't keep a hold of myself, I might not realize how weird certain things were. And I wanted certain things to be weird because I didn't want them to be my life. And that's another kind of disassociatures other presence in the car, I guess the psychological model has named this phenomenon, which is in a moment of extreme stress, the t sect and becomes too our calmness finds another ground or something like that is dissociation as defense. Right. I felt when I was writing the book, like, oh my god, that's the purpose of this book. In a certain way. I get to go back and keep myself company. I get to go back as a steady hand as someone is to some degree made it out fine to all the difficult times of my childhood when I didn't know if we would make it out fine. And I can't influence anything, but I get it's gonna sit in the backseat and be this presence. Describe your mother to me. My mother is humanist. I think if she's not creative, if she's not expressing herself artistically, even in one day, she feels disconnected from herself and becomes depressed. She decided when I was born that she was going to become she was going to be a mother and an artist, that she was going to do them both, and she's pursued that fairly intensely. She is very beautiful. I think she's really blunt. She's really honest. She will tell the truth without thinking of the consequences, because the truth is the only important thing to her. Was that also true for you, you were a child. There was a kind of like she wasn't going to soften it so much for a child. She was gonna And I don't mean it's in a kind of crying in the car way, like that was an art extraordinary circumstance. But I mean she would get mary mad at me. For example, if I talked about good guys and bad guys, which I see now children doing all the time. It must have always been interposed childhood. But if I would talk about good guys, she'd get furious. This was useful to Lisa later, this talk of good guys and bad guys. Her mom also talked about not looking at things in black and white, but there were many shades, many colors, also useful later. She was young. She was so young. She was younger than everyone else's mother. She was more beautiful, she was more fun, I think in certain ways. But we would go and get coffee, we would take walks and would go to hike. And how old was she when she had you? She was twenty three. She has a quality where she will sometimes bite the hand that sees her. This feels like part of this honesty, but I'm not sure if it always is, and that quality was frustrating to me when I was a kid. I would have rather lied to make things comfortable for us, and that was not the way she operated. Tell me your first memory of hearing about your father. So at some point, I guess we came back from Tahoe when I was four, and apparently he picked us up in this porsche. I sat on my mother's lap, those were the days, right in the frost seats, and we drove to his He just bought this mansion and wood side, and he bought it for the land and had these big, old, beautiful, huge oak trees, and he said the house was shipped and they had an elevator, and I discovered it, or I felt I discovered it and had an organ room start of going up and down the elevator and I'm playing the organ. I mean, organs is a church organ, so there's like rooms full of pipes. At some point you gave me an apricot from the orchard, and it was just like the best thing I've ever had. And then I think we didn't really start to get to know each other again. When I was seven or eight, and I remember going back to that mansion with him alone where I knew there was an elevator and there was a church organ and I knew that he didn't love that. I was fascinated bordering on a set with those things. There was a lot of silence. I think in retrospect he was very awkward, and I think extraordinary and sort of groups and then sometimes maybe much quieter one on one. Also, he was getting to know his daughter for the first time, which I can only imagine for somebody who maybe he wasn't even particularly good with kids, who maybe felt ashamed he hadn't been there earlier. And also we don't realize that kids that kids can be a little scary when you're an adult, when you don't know how to talk with them and they don't respond the way adults do to reything. Someone told me that the charms that worked on everyone else didn't necessarily worked on me. And so then what did he have. I've never seen someone dressed so well. I remember that, and I wouldn't have been able to put it in those words as a kid. And it wasn't like he wore anything particularly fancy, but at that point he was, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars, so his sweaters. They weren't particularly fancy or anything, but they were like a league different than anything I'd seen. Is like he'd be wearing ripped up jeans. But then there'd be something about his shoes. You know, with our clothes, we wear them a bunch, washed a bunch, and they'd get worn, the colors would fade, and maybe they'd be a little tattered, and they they'd be a little wrinkly from folding. And I think probably with his they were in the drawer and maybe worn only a few times, and they were crisp. But I remember that some puzzlement about the way that he looked in the smells, the smells of new clothes, and then finding it comforting because it was almost like he was an emissary from another world, a world that smells different. Maybe that smells European, right, These clothes were probably perfumed, the package spent over. He drove fast, not particularly well. The fat his car was rumbly. All of the machines around him Nate noises that I that were new to me. Again, they were probably your apacist. There was a feeling of of magic when he was around who they was special. He would come by oh, your guy's coming by, you know, um, maybe we would go for a skate. And he sort of walked in this way where he seemed to fall forward and then bounce up and fall forward. And I remember that, and his hair was so dark, and even now just describing it, just this feeling of love welling up at me right now, even just like, oh, this one, this is the one that I got, and how wonderful he is because he was had a certain sweetness to him, and I I want to say charmed, but I don't think that doesn't justice because it went all the way to the core. We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. Lisa inhabits a world of contrasts that she feels into its rather than comprehends. This is the way it is in childhood, even in our teenage years. We don't yet have the tools will develop later to be able to think through, analyze, understand, so we're left with what we sense and feel in our bodies. And what Lisa felt was the difference between the way her mother and her father moved through the world. Her mother's life was pinched and closed, anxious, pressed, defined by limitation, and her father, though He didn't live or act like a typical rich person. He wore jeans and T shirts, lived in a crumbling mansion. He moved through the world with a sense of possibility and openness. How old were you when he suggested that you come live with him? My moment, I was having horrible fights. I think that she kind of had a crisis. I mean understandably, I think in the sense that she had been raising me alone with for a large part, very very limited support, and then I started kind of taking off in a certain way. I was in a great school, I was doing really well. All I wanted to do was study, and she was kind of the the support staff she was made and this probably cast her back to having always been the maid. And her life was spluttering. She was breaking up with her boyfriend of many years, and I think just everything was really hard for her at that moment, and so we were getting into horrible fights. And also I was like a kind of, you know, a little bit shitty in the sense that I didn't want to do the dishes. I wanted to do my homework and I have, of course, it's fair to help your parents with the dishes. I think it was also like she would kind of naked, as miserable as it could be, because she was in rage. And that's why I didn't want to do the dishes with her, like I didn't want to participate in this, in this anymore. And she was getting worse, and I felt I was getting better. And then also to my father, who had turned his back on me when I was little and then had increasingly become a part of my life, I was now someone he could be proud of. Right, I was doing really well in school, I was. I know that soundsinical. I think in some ways it was like I've gotten all shined up to the point where he'd own me. I don't know that's terrible, but he probably didn't necessarily want to take me any Just about to have a baby, he has a new, very new wife. Um he says he's moved to Palaso a few blocks away. Later I asked him why, and he said, to be close to me. He offered to have me move with him. But it wasn't an offer that was necessarily full of joy. It was almost a full of necessity. Was it? His rules though, that that you not see your mother for six months if you moved in with him, or where did that come from. Was it protective of you because things were so rough with your mother, or was it controlling or or something else. He's just someone who doesn't know what he's necessarily doing in the emotional sphere. Is trying to help me in some ways to try and stay from what has become a terrible environment with my mother, and doesn't know how to love very easily when he doesn't have any control. And I think, if I move over to his house two blocks away from my mother, and then I'm just still going over to my mother's house all this time, and perhaps she's yelling at me, who knows what he's thinking. I mean, if I put it terribly towards him, if I'm seeing my mother all the time, he has no way of making sure I'm okay. And so that's that's what he invented, and then the rules around that. I think we're six months. I remember that kind of vaguely. It was a horrible crime, as you could imagine. I remember a certain relief, like a few I get to not see my mother, but I'm not at fault for it, you know, So, so in the beginning it was just relief, like I get to move away, and it's my father's fault that I don't have to see my mother, you know, because I'm so angry with her, I'm so tired and spice and so I'm this sort of moratorium on contact is a relief for me. I mean, there would have been a million ways to do it better, like we we all probably should have gone to see a therapist. But I don't think my father really believed in seeing a therapist, because you know, obviously people who don't believe in therapists usually there's something lurking under their right. But yeah, that was a real thoughts job. I think telling me that they can't see their mother for takes months. We needed some real help, not some superficial kind of band aid regulated controlling help. We needed real help. And I think he was part of the problem of why we had ended up there, why my mother was in such trouble, and he took on some of solving that problem. He was paying for my school, he was paying for my therapist, going to a great school. I had a great therapist, But he didn't really take it off and I both understand it and I was sad about it. Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. There's a part of what you write about once you're there, you know, once you're living in that home with he and his new wife, and then your baby brother is born, and you describe really powerfully sort of the anxiety that sets in. And one of those ways is your hands, and that you keep on like breaking glasses like you literally can't get a grip. I think it's like some mix of adolescence and destabilization. I just couldn't. I seem to want to be pleasing. I was. I was such a sleezer and will just leaser. Wanted to sit in and wanted to be loved, wanted to be necessary, needed, enjoyed. And yet I keep on breaking glasses all over the kitchen floor, like every day, every day at dinner, and I sit down at dinner, can get pay LESA not a glasses. I'm not a glasses. Time don't And I'm so careful and I'm so careful and I make it through me and I almost said through the meal and then booth something my elbows chest out when I'm reaching for my last bite, whoever it is, and they're another book and glass shutters on the floor, Oh Lasa, and I must have felt it was such a difficulty, such a trial and an annoyance to have this needy teenager in their midst who's constantly breaking glasses on the on the floor where their child is stepping. It's like every night just promising myself I wasn't going to do the worst thing, and then just despite all of my efforts, And this is after I had been so beloved in my schools, and and I've just switched WOLS and I don't know anybody, but I so beloved in my school that I've always had friends, and suddenly I can't make friends, and I can't I can't seem to be beloved and needed, and I keep on pushing myself away from the very thing I think I want, which is somehow to just be included, to be necessary, to be family. So it isn't a particularly good time in the Job's family. There's a new baby, an unhappy, awkward, accident prone teenager, the marriage is new and tense, and Lisa's father's new company isn't going well. Lisa's new stepmother is constitutionally not a warm person, even under the best of circumstances, which these are not. Lisa's feeling the tension in the home and absorbing it in a way, becoming the physical embodiment of it. She's sort of the black sheep the lightning rod. There's something going on with everybody, but it keeps getting expressed through her. So they go see a therapist, Lisa, her stepmother and her father, and in response to Lisa's loneliness and pain, her stepmother says, we're just cold people with honest like girlfriends. You're barking up the wrong tree. We cannot give you this thing you watched. He was gonna have to find it other ways. Not that she said it that way. Even maybe that's okay. We are all not omni capacity people, and maybe the worst thing in life is to lie about it. Maybe we have to be straightforward about our limitations. So at the same time as I find it a shocking admission and a shocking sense to say to someone in high school or something, I also find it refreshing and interesting and honest. And my father, actually, even or wasn't a cold person, kind of added up to that in a certain way because you couldn't depend on the warmth. It was so intermittent and unpredictable. He was passionate, even warm, and he was cold when he was enraged, you know, the kind of cold rage like like he when he was more really enraged in her. He'd completely ignored me, but he wasn't cold. Something I found interesting and heartbreaking in Lisa's story, and so illuminating of her internal condition, is that she pilfered things, small, inconsequential things from her father's home years later, when he was dying and she'd come to visit. She'd take tiny things of no material value, as if these things were going to bring her father close and complete her life. She'd take them on the plane home, a chipped bowl, an old pillow case, a tube of lip gloss, as if these things would fill up all the holes and cracks of whatever was missing. She had done a version of this while in high school as well. This time, after she discovers an envelope full of hundred dollar bills, she peels one off, then later another and another. She buys her sat the coat, she buys gifts for her family. It isn't about the money, It's about the feelings she can't touch or express. The hubbit all are bills. I think that was a way to access my own remorse somehow because that was the result of it. Is I walked around feeling it was almost like after I broke a glass. It was I walked around feeling ashamed and full of remorse. And I wonder if I hadn't felt somehow stolen from or ripped off by my father in some deep way and twisted it against myself, and if I wasn't trying to access those feelings of being so bad that I was worth leaving, of being so such a awful human being that I would have merited being abandoned. Because my feeling, I mean, you know, it's like this is a person who's been into its therapy, but I'm just thinking, what is the results of stealing those hundreds? The result was I walked around always feeling every time I thought it would at least I would think, he's got the it's over. I'm gonna be out, he's gonna be He's going to know how bad I am. I'm going to be left. And so I wonder if in a certain way it found me to him, it bound me to our story, which did not yet feel resolved that he had left me. And why I had no answer was it because I was an ugly baby? Was it because I wasn't lovable? Was it because there was something horribly wrong with my mother? Who I am related to? All of these reasons I could come up with because I didn't know the reason and it hadn't been resolved, and I'm living with him, but it's still not resolved, So I think that's what it was about. But I think it was about keeping myself feeling bad me because I still at my core, had not reached any resolution about our history together through these years. Lisa excels academically. This a great college is going to be her ticket out and maybe also the shiny, sparkling achievement that will solve all these unsolvable problems. She has a dream of going to Harvard, a school which is not out of reach for her, no matter who her father is, And during her interview there some survival instinct kicks in and she lets the interviewer know that her father is the head of a little company called Apple. The tenor of the interview changes. The interviewer excuses herself for a moment, probably to go down the hall to the development office, and when she returns, the level of interest has risen just a bit. I really thought I was going to go to my grave with that story, because if you read that, you'll know I'm probably not you know, maybe I'm not smart enough. I I you'll know how much I was willing to kind of elbow my way into something to get something. You know, you'll know, opportunistic and selfish and sniveling whatever, you'll know all that to me, and I got like, oh god, I don't want people to read that. So it's funny, right I wrote it, and you know, it wasn't so bad. People said, oh, good scene, and I thought, oh, when I got the stories in there that needed to be in there, somehow the shame floated off of the stories for me so that I didn't really worry about how I looked anymore because I felt so much better. I love that. Thank you for that, because that I, I mean, that's sort of something that I talked about all the time and think about it on the podcast, is the way that actually voicing shame, whether you're writing a memoir about it or speaking about it, it actually has this extraordinary effect of ultimately having that shame float away. Right. It wasn't until I started to open up the shameful thing that I appeared. I became his body, So Shane was what his body? So let me ask you one last question. When your father is dying, he says to you again and again and again, he says to you, I owe you one, I owe you one. I'm just wondering what you think he meant by that, and how you sort of took that with you, that sense that he was in some way at the end of all this he was apologizing to you. It was like what I had wanted the whole time. I think it meant like, at least the way that I interpreted that was like you and I see the same truth. What is missing for you? I see, I know I did it. It is not nothing. I had felt this feeling of being kind of ripped off, meaning I didn't get to know my father when I was younger, and he wasn't there for me. He wasn't protecting me as well as he it. So I think it was an acknowledgement of a common truth which was been part of the problem. Gosh, it's amazing how powerful it is to just say that your perspective of something is similar to another person. I didn't need him to make up for it. I didn't need him to apologize forever, but just the idea of like I owe you and I know it was so wonderful. It was such a bomb. It felt like a bomb on a burn, like, oh, if we see things the same way, then I'm not crazy for all of my feelings. And I have felt like some part of him would have been very proud of me, but some part of him would have been very pissed in me writing this book, and and somehow took me some part of the narrative for me. I wrote the book about myself, but he is pulled up in that net. And so I have told myself, you owe me one. This is the one can owe me things. I get to write a book about myself and you can consider some are all of your debt as alta. I want to thank my guest Lisa Brennan Jobs for sharing her story on our show. For more on Lisa's memoir Small Fry, visit Lisa Brennan Jobs dot net. Family Secrets is an I Heeart media production. Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer. Julie Douglas and beth Ann Macaluso are the executive producers. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, get in touch with us at listener mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com. You can also find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder, Facebook at Family Secrets Pod, and Twitter at Family Secrets Pod. For more about my book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com. For more podcasts. For my heart Radio, visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.