Small Fry: A Memoir by Lisa Brennan-Jobs
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

A Land Apart

What a Jerk. Steve Jobs was clearly in that elite group of psychos which includes Trump, Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk. Bullies, liars, pathologically egocentric, litigious bastards one and all. And any taste they have is restricted to their mouths.

Whether or not the world at large is a better place because of Steve Jobs is open to debate. But the immediate world of those around him was hell. Dumps his first partner (actually she dumps him); denies paternity of the child; pays peanuts in child support; apparently stays in contact mainly to gloat. You get the picture.

No doubt the house cleaner/aspiring painter ex is more than a bit flakey. And the child didn’t benefit much from her mother’s ineptness with relationships and employment. Stability was not a virtue the little duo was blessed with. But hey you’d think after his first few hundred million bucks Jobs might have settled them in someplace cozy. Not a chance. Although to be fair, he did help with the rent.

As we all know California is a place and a society apart. Perhaps it always has been since the time when the first inhabitants trailed in from Asia. It seems to me that this myopic biography is as much about the strangeness of California as a culture as it is about what is really only a footnote in Jobs’s life. It’s context to that life rather than content.

The genre to which this book could be assigned is something like Detritus of the Rich and Famous - a melange of random memoir, light gossip, and relational failure. Marginally interesting for the enthusiast but hardly more revelatory than what’s already available about a seriously neurotic and seriously distasteful Titan of business.

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