"He was greedy only when it came to me" - memoirs of Steve Jobs's daughter

2024 Author: Malcolm Clapton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 03:44

An excerpt from the book "Little Fish", in which the genius and the inventor is revealed from an unusual side.

Once I asked my father if he donated to charity. In response, he snapped back, saying that it was "none of my business." Lauren once bought her niece a velvet dress, paying with his card, and this resulted in a scandal - he loudly read the numbers from the check in the kitchen. I assumed that his tight-fistedness was partly to blame for the lack of furniture in the house, that Reed did not have a nanny to constantly help with him, that the housekeeper came occasionally. Perhaps I was wrong.

In grocery stores, when we visited the Gap and in restaurants, he loudly calculated what it cost and what an ordinary family could afford. If the prices were too high, he would become indignant and refuse to pay. And I wanted him to admit that he was not like everyone else and spend without looking back.

I also heard about his generosity: he bought Tina an Alfa Romeo, and Lauren bought a BMW. He also paid off her student loan. It seemed to me that he was greedy only when it came to me, and refused to buy me another pair of jeans, or furniture, or fix the heating. He was generous with everyone else.

It was difficult to understand why a person who has so much money creates an atmosphere of scarcity around him, why he does not shower us with them.

Besides a Porsche, my father had a big silver Mercedes. I called him Little State.

- Why Small State? - asked the father.

“Because it's the size of a small state, heavy enough to crush it, and expensive enough to feed its population for a year,” I replied.

It was a joke, but I also wanted to offend him - to point out how much he spends on himself, to force him to delve into himself, to be honest with himself.

“The Little State,” he said, chuckling. “It's really funny, Liz.

Once, passing me in the corridor, my father said:

- You know, each of my new girls had a more complicated relationship with their father than the previous one.

I didn’t know why he said this and what conclusion I should have made.

Most of the women I know, like me, grew up without a father: their fathers abandoned them, died, divorced their mothers.

The absence of a father was not something unique or significant. The significance of my father was different. Instead of raising me, he invented machines that changed the world; he was rich, famous, moved in society, smoked weed and then rode around the south of France with a billionaire named Pigozzi, had an affair with Joan Baez. No one would have thought, "This guy should have been raising his daughter instead." What an absurdity.

No matter how bitter it was to me that he was not around for so long, and no matter how acutely I felt this bitterness, I suppressed it in myself, did not let me fully realize it: I am wrong, I am selfish, I am an empty place. I was so used to considering my attitude towards him, his attitude towards me and, in general, the attitude of fathers and children in general as something unimportant, that I did not realize that this position became for me as natural as air.

And only recently, when a friend called me - older than me, the father of an adult daughter - and told me about her engagement, I realized something. His daughter and her fiancé came to tell him the news, and he, to his own surprise, burst into tears.

- Why did you cry? I asked.

“It's just that since she was born, I - my wife and I - had to protect her and take care of her,” he replied. - And I realized that now it is the duty of someone else. I'm no longer on the front lines, not the main person in her life.

After this conversation, I began to suspect that I had underestimated what I had missed, what my father had missed.

Living with him, I tried to express this in everyday language - the language of dishwashers, sofas and bicycles, reducing the cost of his absence to the cost of things. I felt that I was not given some trifles, and this feeling did not go away, it hurt in my chest. In fact, it was something more, the whole Universe, and I felt it in my gut during that telephone conversation: between us there was not that love, that need to take care of each other, which are only between a father and a child.

[…]

One evening, when Lauren was returning home, I went out to meet her at the gate, where rose bushes grew.

- Do you know that computer, Lisa? she asked, closing the gate to the tinkle of the ring. Her hair shimmered in the sun, and she had a leather briefcase over her shoulder. “It was named after you, right?

We had never talked about this before, and I didn't know why she was asking now. Maybe someone asked her.

- I do not know. Probably - I lied. Hopefully she would close the topic.

“It must be in honor of you,” she said. - Let's ask when he comes back.

“It doesn't matter,” I replied. I didn't want my father to say no again. Although, maybe if Lauren asks, he will answer in the affirmative?

A few minutes later, he appeared at the gate, and Lauren went to him. I followed her.

“Honey,” she said, “that computer was named after Lisa, right?

“No,” he replied.

- Truth?

- Yes. Truth.

- Come on, - she looked into his eyes. I felt admiration and gratitude that she kept pushing when I would have given up. They stared into each other's eyes as they stood on the path that led to the door.

“It’s not named after Lisa,” my father replied.

At that moment I regretted that she asked. I was embarrassed: now Lauren knew that I was not as important to my father as she probably thought.

"Then who did you name him after?"

“My old friend,” he said, looking into the distance, as if remembering. With longing. It was because of the sad dreaminess in his eyes that I believed that he was telling the truth. Otherwise, it was more like a pretense.

I got a strange sensation in my stomach - it appeared when I was faced with falsehood or stupidity, and lately it has hardly left me. And why would he lie? His real feelings clearly belonged to the other Lisa. I never heard that in his youth he met a girl Lisa, and later told my mother about it. "Nonsense!" was her answer. But maybe she just didn't know, maybe he kept the first Lisa a secret from both of us.

“Sorry, buddy,” he said, patting me on the back, and entered the house.

Lisa Brennan-Jobs is a journalist, daughter of Steve Jobs from her first marriage. They had a difficult relationship from the very beginning, Jobs did not recognize paternity for a long time, but then he took the girl to him. In this book, Lisa described her growing up and the difficulties of communicating with her father.