Steve Jobs’ Daughter Details Awkward Relationship With Late Father

Other excerpts include the time Jobs told her that she “smelt like a toilet” while on his deathbed.

Steve Jobs with the first iPhone on 9 January 2007. 

(Photo: AP)

Lisa Brennan-Jobs’ new memoir about her childhood and her complex relationship with her father, Small Fry, is set to hit the stands on 4 September.

Filled with surprisingly cruel interactions between the two, the book is already making waves, so much so that in a recent New York Times interview, Brennan says she is afraid people will misconstrue his legacy and the person he was.

Have I failed? Have I failed in fully representing the dearness and the pleasure? The dearness of my father, and the outrageous pleasure of being with him when he was in good form?

In the book, Steve Jobs is shown neglecting and even being ruthless towards his daughter who he had when he was 23. He then denied paternity to her, despite having a DNA match, and gave little financial and emotional support to her growing up.

In one moment in the book, Brennan-Jobs describes her dad’s behaviour with wife Laurene Powell Jobs —and how he made his daughter watch. Jobs, the daughter writes, pulled her stepmother “in to a kiss, moving his hand closer to her breasts,” up her thigh, “moaning theatrically.” Brennan-Jobs writes that she tried to leave but that her dad stopped her in her tracks.

“‘Hey Lis, stay here. We’re having a family moment. It’s important that you try to be part of this family,” she writes in the book.

Other widely-circulated and harshly-judged excerpts include the time Jobs told her that she “smelt like a toilet” while on his deathbed, the time he lied to her that Apple Lisa was in fact not named after her and the time he refused to install heat in her bedroom.

But, speaking to NY Times, Lisa wants the reader to know she forgives him. “He was instilling a value system; teaching me honesty...”, she explains. The more problematic part remains that she wants the reader to also forgive Jobs and not take what she has written only at face value, something only time will tell come 4 September.

In a statement to the NY Times, Steve’s wife, Powell Jobs, her children and Jobs’s sister, Mona Simpson, said: “Lisa is part of our family, so it was with sadness that we read her book, which differs dramatically from our memories of those times. The portrayal of Steve is not the husband and father we knew.”