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(introduction music)
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Lisa Brennan-Jobs, you've written a memoir
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with all its personality and details and peculiarity
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and it's not to be mistaken for a biography
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of Steve Jobs and yet, and yet, he's your father
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and is very much at the center of the book as are you.
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And I want to start at the beginning of things
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and have you read from the beginning of the book
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if you would.
Okay.
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Three months before he died, I began to steal things
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from my father's house.
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I wandered around barefoot and slipped objects
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into my pockets.
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I took blush, toothpaste, two chipped finger bowls
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in celadon blue, a bottle of nail polish,
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a pair of worn patent leather ballet slippers
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and four faded white pillowcases, the color of old teeth.
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After stealing each item, I felt sated.
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I promised myself that this would be the last time.
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But soon, the urge to take something else
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would arrive again like thirst.
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Now, in your book, Steve Jobs is the father,
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often the missing father, the father that rejects you
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for a long time, much later invites you in,
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there are moments of real cruelty but you begin
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this book in the way that you do, why?
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I guess it makes me an active participant in the book.
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One thing that happened when I started writing
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is I was disappearing in the pages.
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I was writing about my parents and different things
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that had happened and I couldn't...
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Other people who read it said, "I can't quite locate you."
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at some point, I read This Boy's Life again.
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This is Tobias Wolf's memoir.
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Tobias, yeah.
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And I realized that every time he was devious,
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I loved him more.
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The worse he was, the more I adored him.
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So with that
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license or with that new idea,
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I found a new freedom
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to try and figure out
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where I had participated in my own life
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and more where I'd been kind of bad, yeah.
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What is the most daunting aspect of setting out
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to write this book in your 30s?
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Your father occupies a space in
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the popular imagination of a creator giant.
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You walk down the street and you see iPhone
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after iPhone after iPhone.
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Over there, there's an iMac, it's everywhere.
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There's no escaping it
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and yet your vantage point is entirely different.
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How do you process that in literary terms
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as a part of a book?
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I wanted to write this book and even though,
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despite the fact that there's this really famous person
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in my family, I wanted to write a coming of age story
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about a girl growing up in California in the 80s and 90s
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because I felt like if I got into it enough,
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if I got deep enough into it, it was a universal story.
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When you read somebody else's memoir
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whose in their late 30s and they're talking about
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when they were 6 or 7, how do we understand that
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as opposed to journalism or biography or scholarship.
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Yeah.
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How do we read that?
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I feel like it's quite true, I keep on getting notes
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from people who are in the book saying,
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"Oh my god, this is completely accurate,"
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but I felt for a long time and I think that a lot of people
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can come out with their first book and it has a lot
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of issues with it, a lot of problems, a lot of flaws,
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maybe, and I felt that this one to some degree,
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I had to be,
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it had to be less impeachable so that it would be worthy
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of the extra attention.
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Particularly in the first half of the book,
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there's a great deal of cruelty,
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some of it mindless, some of it you ascribe to immaturity
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on his part but it's painful to read.
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What was that like to reexperience
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everyday over your desk?
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You have this thing with memoir
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where you're going back and you're writing about it again
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and you're pulled back into these feelings and these times
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in order to write about them
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but on the other side, at the end of the day,
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I got to put down the pen and then go back to my life
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so I got to be, I mean it's like the fantasy of control,
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right?
Mastery of the past.
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Right so I got to go back and live in the past
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and elongate the good moments and maybe even elongate
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the bad moments to really figure out what they meant to me
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and suffer through them but I still had control over them.
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And I had perspective control, I could see them
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from the point of view of an adult and a child.
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I was no longer just the child.
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With multiple perspectives all at once.
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Yeah and I talk about that with my mother in the car,
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I think I'm three or four, and my mother who has read
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the article in Time magazine that says
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my father kind of said she'd slept around
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so who knows if he's the father
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and she had read this article
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and it had been devastating and we had no money
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and we're going back and it's raining and she's getting lost
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and she started screaming, not at me,
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but kind of at the world and she's screaming
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and she slams the dash and it was terrifying.
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And you remember this?
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Yeah, I remember it and I remember her,
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yeah her feeling of hopelessness and her rage was terrifying
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and then I write about this in the book in one of these
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sort of spiritual moments I wasn't sure whether to put in
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where I felt as if there was, even at the time,
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there was a presence in the back of the car
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kind of with us, a good presence that couldn't interfere.
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In some ways...
The presence of your father?
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No, the presence of me writing the book.
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I see.
That has been
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the feeling of going back and writing about childhood,
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like I get to, I get to go back and keep myself company.
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I can't interfere but I'm a benevolent presence
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that then gets to keep this girl company
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as she travels all these and gets to say,
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"It's gonna be okay, you're gonna be okay."
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After your book was published, Lorene Powell Jobs,
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his widow, your stepmother, and Mona Simpson, your aunt,
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who herself is a very good novelist,
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issued a statement saying, worded very carefully,
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but I'll summarize it, essentially,
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"We saw the past very differently,"
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which only stands to reason but clearly distanced themselves
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from your book in a very distinct way
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and they clearly were not happy about the book.
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What do you think is at the center of their unhappiness
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of the book and how do you interpret their statement
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and criticism of it?
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I think people have been writing about me a long time
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and so I know, I know what it feels like to have
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a sort of a slice of your life
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represented by someone else and I know that
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it doesn't always feel very good
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so that was part of my trepidation in writing a book,
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what did I have a right?
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Why did I have a right?
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You had to give yourself permission.
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Yeah but what I decided is that I did have the right
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to write my own story as accurately and as beautifully
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and as full of complexity as I could.
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I had that right.
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I decided, ya know, other people might feel differently.
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You have any relationship with Mona Simpson
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or Lorene Powell Jobs at this point?
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Oh yeah, I mean I care about them
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and we'll see how Thanksgiving is.
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(laughing)
How is is usually?
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It's pretty good.
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It is, okay.
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So the Steve Jobs that comes out of popular imagination,
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you get the sense of a visionary, a certain kind of genius,
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a really difficult, difficult guy, at times cruel,
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self-centered.
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The way that you just read he came off
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was from the other things that you've read,
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not from my book.
Absolutely.
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So,
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and for,
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and I'm curious to know, I'm curious to know from you,
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how was it different in my book?
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The way that he came off?
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Than from these other things?
Quite radically different
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but mostly I'm seeing it through you.
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Right, I thought so, too.
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It's a book about you.
Yeah.
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And how does he come off differently?
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Well there are moments where I want to hit him.
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More than before?
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Well because it's coming from a kid
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who's palpable on the page.
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Right, right, 'cause you can feel my,
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you can feel the feelings more.
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Yeah.
Yeah.
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So it's like it's not necessarily a different character
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that I'm describing, it's just that it's visceral now.
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I think that's fair.
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I've tried to understand why this reaction
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has been strong because I feel like he's been
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so well covered...
Yeah.
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And that there are moments of joy, tenderness,
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sweetness, care in this book between the two of us
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that are nowhere else, right?
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Well maybe it's because people feel a certain sense of,
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it's very strange to me in a certain way,
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relationship and ownership to this guy
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who's now been dead for a while
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because he's in their pockets, he's on their desks.
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Maybe you should tell us about what happened
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when he was very sick.
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We kind of had a Hollywood moment
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which I didn't have enough,
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I didn't have the guts to hope for,
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the audacity to hope for.
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Tell us what happened, where, when.
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Yeah I went back to see him before he died
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and he was, he was apologizing fiercely
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for a weekend and crying and saying,
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"I owe you one, I owe you one,"
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which seemed like such an odd phrase.
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What does I owe you one mean?
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I don't know, I didn't know how to make sense
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of it really and the way that I made sense of it at the time
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and I think it was both, on my part,
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a kindness, a sweetness, which I really meant,
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and a way to sort of underscore my frustration
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that I said to him, "If we could do it again,
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"if there are multiple lifetimes,"
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and obviously we do not know,
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"then maybe next time we could be friends,"
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and what I meant was we were good as friends
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'cause we liked each other, we would laugh together,
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it was fun when we were friends.
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Lisa, thank you so much.
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Thank you, thank you.