Small Fry: A Review

When I picked up Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s Small Fry, I expected a tell-all narrative about Steve Jobs. Hearing little more than “he was a jerk,” I was hungry for the details about his life, about his relationships with colleagues and families alike. I wanted to know the intricacies of a brilliant mind who was reputed to be so cruel, and to understand the underlying motives and ambiguities that fleshed out his character.

It turns out he was just kind of a jerk; surprisingly, Jobs is ultimately the least interesting person in the book. This is a text that quietly asks its readership to shift expectations from “confessions of an abused daughter” to musings about the complexities and pains of familial relationships. If and when the reader is open to such a change, the book becomes a profound and thought-provoking read.

We are first introduced to Jobs at the tail end of his life, as he tells his daughter from his deathbed that she smells like a toilet. This reverse chronological order is nothing new, although it does allow the reader to see that even in the most vulnerable of moments, Jobs continues to spout hateful comments. Most of the text continues this thread: Jobs is portrayed as a hateful, controlling monster, no matter the context. We might get the details of Jobs’s exact form of hate that we have been craving, but with that comes no nuance or suggestion of vulnerability in his character. Up until the very end of the book, Jobs is an archetype of the cruel, uninvolved father.

Much of the beginning lacks a cohesive thread. Jobs is largely absent from the beginning chapters, and instead we are inundated with seemingly unimportant backstory about Lisa’s parents. Lisa drives home the point that she and her mother were poor. Jobs is an ancillary character who has a lot of money, yet refuses to lend it to his ex and daughter. In fact, after nearly fifty pages of introduction, Lisa admits, “Steve. I knew so little about him” (48). Again, we see Jobs as cruel, as evidenced by his shameless ego: “‘Do you know who I am?....I’m your father. I’m one of the most important people you will ever know’” (13). There are references to Jobs’s work, but Lisa never dives into what it entails. Barring a couple of scenes, we don’t see Jobs at the office. Here begins the suggestion that this text isn’t really about Jobs; rather, his absence is a lens through which to see Lisa’s life.

Discovering the depth of characters is painfully slow in the beginning. The mother, too, is archetypal. She seems a stereotype of the unreliable artist flitting about with wild dreams and an empty bank account. She has an influx of boyfriends, wants to desperately to be a good mother, and in doing so, spends money she doesn’t have. Much of this section is factual, as though Lisa is so used to her mother’s flighty nature, she no longer reacts to it. Only later do we see a fuller version of Lisa’s mother.

Getting the initial sense that this book was largely an emotionless autobiography, I almost abandoned it. But I pressed on, mostly because I wanted to have another entry on Goodreads. As Lisa offers her own self-reflections, her writing comes alive, and the readers’ emotional investment in Lisa expands dramatically. These reflections are strong and poignant:

"I began to feel there was something gross and shameful about me, and also to know that it was too late to change it, that nothing could be done. I was different from other girls my age, and anyone good and pure could immediately sense this and would be repulsed. One indication was the photograph. Another was that I could not read. The last was that I was meticulous and self-conscious in a way I could tell the other girls were not. My desires were too strong and furious….I felt this quality in myself, and I was sure it must show when people saw me" (28).

Here we see a little girl in tremendous pain—not because of Jobs (Lisa knows no different from the absent father), and not solely about her poverty. Her pain comes from a feeling of being on the outside, of wanting so desperately to fit in, and of noticing a devastating alienation from her classmates. This is a nearly universal story, which begins to situate Lisa on the same level as her audience. Jobs has not yet told Lisa that she will never fit in—this isolation isn’t the outcome of a narcissistic billionaire. Instead, it’s the outcome of self-hatred that is all too common in young girls.


While Jobs’s actions are largely uninteresting, it is Lisa’s perceptions of her father that we cling onto. This dichotomy between reality and interpretation is a reminder that despite our best attempts to use facts, perceptions of our parents will always be skewed. Lisa sees Jobs’s use of commonplace phrases such as “let’s call it a day” as sophisticated and other-worldly. Lisa further explores a sense of the fantastical, surreal nature of Jobs’s life as she describes spending time in his home: “We existed outside regular time. The mornings with him, too, would have a timeless quality, more empty space and white light and silence—unlike the mornings with my mother, when we raced to dress in front of the heaters and ate toast in the car….Here there was no rush, no breathlessness” (101). These observations introduce the dichotomy between the competing worlds in Lisa’s life.

Lisa largely seems to be a reflection of her parents, but we do get a glimmer of her self-development and exploration, as she discusses an affinity with writing. She is proud of her teacher’s praise of her work, and notes the ease in finding the words to create a smooth, polished essay. In keeping with my appreciation for Lisa’s inner musings, I would have liked to see more of this exploration, as it deepens our understanding of the main character of the text.

Towards the middle of the book, we still see vivid descriptions of Jobs’s cruelty: he blatantly and unapologetically insults Lisa’s cousin as she loudly orders food at a restaurant and eats in a sloppy manner. Lisa recognizes her father’s emotional abuse, which makes it all the more frustrating—but not surprising—when she is still desperate for Jobs’s approval. Yet as Lisa sprinkles stories of her father’s selfishness and violence, she invites us into the far more complex, ambiguous, and (in my opinion) interesting world of her relationship with her mother. Again, she uses Jobs as a mirror in which to gaze at and critique the world where she is fully accepted. Everything with Jobs is tidy and cold; his interactions with Lisa’s mother showcase the disparate nature between the two worlds, alongside Lisa’s determination to take sides:

"Next to him, [my mother] looked ragged and disheveled. When she spoke, sobbing, she was hardly intelligible. Looking back, I’m ashamed to see that I just wanted her to act neat and quiet….I didn’t want my father to think I was anything like her….She seemed too dramatic. Crazy, even. I wanted her to feel less, express less" (212).

Lisa’s expression of shame felt towards her mother seems familiar to the dislike that Jobs expresses about Lisa. And while Lisa acknowledges her awareness about Jobs’s problematic behavior, she reflects that same casual cruelty towards her mother. As Lisa moves between houses, her desperate desire to be seen by her father deepens. Paradoxically, as Lisa so desperately wants warmth and affection in the Jobs household, she rejects it from the parent who has been around all along:

"The first two days as my mother’s felt excessively warm, almost cloying, as she followed me around, tending to me, cooking with what I’d recently understood to be an excess of oil, and profligate butter. I felt superior. I knew things she didn’t. I hated how needy she was, how vulnerable, wanting to be with me even when I said I was fine alone; I hated the fact that I was related to her, that because of her I was unable to belong in the other house….I wanted to be someone else, to be prettier, blonde, tall, worthy—but she seemed to love me, to like me, as I was. I doubted her taste" (289).

This, to me, is where the book becomes most alive and poignant. I may hold a certain degree of personal bias, as I find this passage eerily similar to my own life. This story is unique to Lisa, yet it also points to the universality of the strained mother-daughter relationship. We see an intricate, believable, and painful depiction of the violent swing between closeness and hatred. As daughters, we might see ourselves, yet as daughters, we open our eyes (perhaps for the first time) to the scarring impact this dynamic has on mothers who are loving, flawed, and trying very hard.

This passage also demonstrates the elegant maturity of Lisa: she could easily play the victim card and portray her mother as a bumbling idiot, but she recognizes her deficiencies, and doesn’t shy away from discussing her own cruelty—a cruelty that is uncomfortably similar to her father’s. Yet unlike the depictions of Jobs, this passage does not force the reader to detach from or feel disdain for Lisa; if anything, it further humanizes her, and encourages her readers to explore their own opposing desires and messy familial interactions.

Returning to the theme of alienation and isolation, Lisa uses the figure of her stepmother—Laurene—to explore her desire to approximate normalcy. While Lisa makes clear that both of her parents are far from normal, Laurene is the hero who understands how to be a person in the world. This part of the text gives the reader a clearer understanding of why Lisa wants to spend time in a house that has almost no furniture, a broken dishwasher, and a freezing bedroom. We sympathize with Lisa as she almost worships’ Laurene’s influence: “Laurene seemed to understand the division between strange and relatable in a way we did not….What a relief it was to have [her] with her knowledge of etiquette and protocol. Who knew people who did not frame birth certificates and put them on walls” (248). With this appreciation for etiquette and normalcy comes an implicit depiction of a cold, unwelcome house that holds no room for the free expression of people like Lisa.

Lisa uses her relation to Jobs to sell the book, but from early on, we recognize that this text is not about Jobs (a solid move, as writing solely about Jobs would make for a very boring, very predictable book). Lisa ultimately acknowledges the ubiquity of her story:

"Like me, most of the women I knew did not have fathers when they were growing up. Not having a father wasn’t unique, or even significant. My father’s significance was elsewhere. Instead or raising me, he was inventing world-changing machines; he was famous, mingling, accruing, driving stoned in the South of France" (275).

Rather than focus on the superficial relationship that Lisa had with her father (barring a few special moments they had skating and appreciating the beauty of nature), Lisa uses her positionality as the daughter of a celebrity to explore the complexity of relationships, the difficulty of differentiating yourself from your parents. She beautifully expresses the paradox of simultaneously appreciating and despising those who are closest. She challenges us to investigate the venomous, tangled mother-daughter relationship, and of painful, frustrating, and altogether human nature of those around us.