[MUSIC PLAYING]
LISA BRENNAN-JOBS:
Thank you for coming.
I want to let you know that
this is a coming-of-age memoir.
So it's like, I don't really
know much about my father's
business life, just in case
anybody wants to get up and go.
Like, oh.
This memoir took me
a long time to write.
Probably memoirs generally
are artistic projects.
My guess is they often
take a long time.
But it took me a while
because in the very beginning,
I found myself sort of
disappearing on the pages,
and this is a coming-of-age
memoir about a girl-- me--
growing up in the '80s and '90s
in Northern California, Silicon
Valley, and against the backdrop
of a complicated family.
And so it was problematic if I
wasn't showing up on the pages.
I think some of the scenes
would be kind of good.
They'd have my parents.
They'd have a little
bit of action.
I had to figure out you have
to write a scene, it turns out,
if you're going
to write a memoir.
I could write, but
I wrote essays,
and if you write an
essay for this long--
this is a 400-page book--
you sort of lose everyone
after page 10, I guess,
because it's so condensed.
So instead, I had to learn
to write scenes, which
mean that I'm letting you live
in the moments of my past,
I guess.
But I was disappearing in them.
So the stakes of writing
this memoir felt kind of high
because I think that the
last thing I wanted to do
was be a person--
the child of a
celebrity, essentially--
and be writing a memoir, because
a celebrity memoir-- like,
cringe.
But I felt, I guess,
that there was
a kind of quality of
disappearing in my own life,
and that if I would
write this book,
I could write other
books after, but I
couldn't write those
other books until I
solved this disappearing
issue and this shame issue.
It's almost like in
high school English
when you have to identify the
themes of different books.
And even though this
is a non-fiction book,
when I condensed it down to
its essence, there was a theme,
and it was a question
of illegitimacy.
Did I have a right to
stand on the ground?
My own story-- why did
I have a right to exist?
And so in that sense,
even though I'm saying it
rather dramatically, I guess
it's kind of universal,
because I think that's
a more common question.
So what happened-- the fix for
the disappearance, I think,
was that one of the
inspirations that I read--
Tobias Wolff's,
"This Boy's Life."
It's a memoir.
And I noticed that the
more naughty and devious
and bad young Tobias was,
the more I totally loved him.
So I was like, oh, OK.
So I started to
access my character
through noticing
where I did things
that were kind of shameful.
And then, as I wrote
them, the scenes
were pretty good because
they had life to them.
And so then, I
guess, in that way,
I sort of began to
appear on the pages.
So I'll start with--
I'll read you from a little bit
of the beginning of the book.
This is a sort of terribly
embarrassing story
which happened,
obviously, of noticing
that I was taking things.
So like many of the
stories in this book,
I thought, oh, God,
I can't include it.
But then ultimately,
it's in here.
Three months before he died,
I began to steal things
from my father's house.
I wandered around barefoot
and slipped objects
into my pockets.
I took blush, toothpaste,
two chipped finger bowls
in celadon blue, a
bottle of nail polish,
a pair of worn patent
leather ballet slippers,
and four faded,
white pillowcases
the color of old teeth.
After stealing each
item, I felt sated.
I promised myself that this
would be the last time.
But soon, the urge to
take something else
would arrive again like thirst.
I tiptoed into my father's room,
careful to step over the creaky
floorboard at the entrance.
This room had been
his study when
he could still climb the
stairs, but he slept here now.
It was cluttered with books and
mail and bottles of medicine,
glass apples, wooden apples,
awards and magazines and stacks
of paper.
There were framed prints
by [INAUDIBLE] of twilight
and sunset at temples.
A patch of pink light stretched
out on a wall beside him.
He was propped up in
bed, wearing shorts.
His legs were bare
and thin as arms,
bent up like a grasshopper's.
"Hey, Leese," he said.
[INAUDIBLE] Rinpoche
stood beside him.
He'd been around recently
when I came to visit.
A short Brazilian man
with sparkling brown eyes,
the Rinpoche was a Buddhist monk
with a scratchy voice who wore
brown robes over a round belly.
We call him by his title.
Tibetan holy men were
sometimes born in the West
now in places like Brazil.
To me, he didn't seem holy.
He wasn't distant
or inscrutable.
Near us, a black
canvas bag of nutrients
hummed with a motor and a pump,
the tube disappearing somewhere
under my father's sheets.
"It's a good idea
to touch his feet,"
the Rinpoche said, putting his
hands around my father's foot
in the bed like this.
I didn't know if
the foot touching
was supposed to be for my father
or for me or for both of us.
"OK," I said, and took his
other foot in its thick sock,
even though it was strange
watching my father's face
because when he winced
in pain or anger,
it looked similar to
when he started to smile.
"That feels good," my father
said, closing his eyes.
I glanced at the chest
of drawers beside him
and at the shelves on the other
side of the room for objects
I wanted, even though I knew I
wouldn't dare steal something
out right in front of him.
While he slept, I
wandered through the house
looking for I didn't know what.
A nurse sat on the couch in
the living room, her hands
on her lap, listening for my
father to call out for help.
The house was quiet,
the sounds muffled.
The white, painted brick walls
were dimpled like cushions.
In the cabinet of the
half-bath near the kitchen,
where there used to be a
tattered copy of the "Bhagavad
Gita," I found a bottle of
expensive rose facial mist.
With the door closed,
the light out,
sitting on the toilet seat,
I sprayed it up into the air
and closed my eyes.
The mist fell around
me, cool and holy,
as in a forest or
an old stone church.
There was also a tube
of silver lip gloss
with a brush at one end and a
twisting mechanism at the other
that released liquid into
the center of the brush.
I had to have it.
I stuffed the lip
gloss into my pocket
to take back to the one-bedroom
apartment in Greenwich Village
that I shared with my boyfriend,
where I knew, as much as I have
ever known anything, that
this tube of lip gloss
would complete my life.
Between avoiding the
housekeeper, my brother
and sisters, and my
stepmother around the house
so I wouldn't be
caught stealing things,
or hurt when they didn't
acknowledge me or reply
to my hellos, and spraying
myself in the darkened bathroom
to feel less like I was
disappearing because
inside the falling
mist, I had a sense
of having an outline again.
Making efforts to see my
sick father in his room
began to feel like a
burden, a nuisance.
For the past year, I'd
visited every weekend,
every other month or so.
I'd given up on the possibility
of a grand reconciliation,
the kind in movies, but
I kept coming anyway.
Before I said goodbye,
I went to the bathroom
to mist one more time.
The spray was
natural, which meant
that over the course
of a few minutes,
it no longer smelled sharp like
roses, but fetid and stinky
like a swamp, although I
didn't know it at the time.
As I came into his
room, he was getting
into a standing position.
I watched him gather both
of his legs in one arm,
twist himself 90
degrees by pushing
against the headboard
with the other arm,
and then use both arms to hoist
his own legs over the edge
of the bed and onto the floor.
When we hugged, I could feel
his vertebrae, his ribs.
He smelled musty,
like medicine sweat.
"I'll be back soon," I said.
We detached, and I
started walking away.
"Leese?"
"Yeah?"
"You smell like a toilet."
It was the rose spray.
And this is one scene of many.
I actually returned
all the things.
This is not a story of a theft.
Although I did like the idea
of theft as a kind of metaphor
for what I was doing,
there's a terror
when you're writing a
memoir because even if you
want to write about
yourself, you find
that you have just yourself.
You find that you necessarily
pull all these other people up
into your net, and so
you have a responsibility
to do the best job with
them you can-- to be kind,
and to be honest,
and to try to capture
some element of their character,
at least as it relates
to your own life.
But sometimes, you aren't
able to capture necessarily
the fullness of
everyone's character.
You're capturing how
they're interesting to you,
and you're using
them in a certain way
to tell an emotional
story of yourself.
But I did get an email once
from my mother's ex-boyfriend,
and the email was
titled "Correction."
And I thought, oh, no.
And I went into it, and he said
that there was a person named
Ron in my book, and perhaps
I had described him,
and that this person
named Ron in my book
had many similarities to
this boyfriend, who was also
named Ron, in that they
both worked for NASA
and that they both had dated
my mother at a certain point,
but that I described this
person, who clearly wasn't him,
as having hair tufted on
the sides like a clown
and having a totally
shiny, bald head
and walking with
his feet splayed out
and having lips like a fish.
I thought, oh, God.
And so he said, I've attached
a photograph of myself
for further reference if
you do want to describe me,
and he had a picture of Fabio.
But then I thought,
oh, no, why have I
described this man, who is quite
wonderful, in this sort of not
very flattering way?
And then I thought
back on that scene
and I realized, oh, it was
because I was meeting him
for the very first time.
He'd just started
dating my mother,
and I felt possessive
of my mother,
and I wasn't sure I
liked him so much.
And so that's why I had
described him that way.
Now that I've already
described myself
in a sort of compromised
way, the only way
I felt like I had permission to
describe other people the way
that they were and with all of
their eccentricities is like,
I had to describe my own.
The other thing I
can say right now--
I'm just worried that
in my scatterbrain-ness,
I'll forget later-- is something
like, I'm trying to give people
the chance to have
their own story
within the pages of my story.
So I think different people
take different things
from this book.
They have different
relationships
with their parents, and they
had different coming-of-age
stories.
And it's been sort of a
victory to me, this idea
that I've brought up people's
pasts for themselves,
because they've come
up to me at readings
and they've said, oh, that
feels exactly like me.
I'm a single mother.
Or they've said, oh, my
father was like that.
He would make jokes like that,
or he was difficult like that.
And I've noticed that if you
read a book at a certain point
in your life, maybe a book
that you love, and then
you wait 10 years and
you read it again,
it's almost like it's a
totally different book.
And I have a feeling it's
not the book that changed.
I think it's that we
continuously change,
and then art, hopefully,
reflects our own changes back
to us.
So I think that it's
sort of a difficult thing
because this book that
I wrote about my family
is now everyone else's book.
It's not mine
anymore, and I have
to release it and say
whatever you get out of it,
it's what you're supposed to
get out of it because it's
your book now.
Of course, it's a
little difficult
because it's my
family, and sometimes I
want to say, no, that's
not what I meant.
But that doesn't
really matter anymore.
But without further
ado, the Ron story.
Since she'd become
interested in Ron,
she no longer paid attention
to me as astutely, I thought.
She no longer
consulted the I Ching.
She was half-absent
with happiness,
the same slight
smile on her lips
as when she ran up the hill
to get the prickly pear.
It was between boyfriends,
between the loneliness
and despair that
followed one and the lift
that began the next, where
I hoped to stay forever,
she and I the only
team, the real couple.
On the night of the date,
Ron arrived on time.
She was leaning over
the bathroom sink,
doing her makeup
when he knocked.
I ran to open the door.
I saw right away that
Ron wasn't a hippie.
He was bald, with hair tufted
on the side like a clown's, and
had wide, bushy
eyebrows, glasses
rimmed with gold, and large,
swollen lips like a fish.
He looked clean and smelled
of soap and detergent.
"Hello," I said.
"I'm Lisa.
My mom's getting ready."
"Nice to meet you," he
said, holding out his hand.
He followed me into
the living room.
I noticed that as he walked, his
feet splayed out dramatically
to either side.
My mother called
from the bathroom.
"I'll be out in a minute."
As we passed the bookshelf,
I reached for the album
of photographs of my birth.
This was unplanned.
It surprised even me,
one arm jutting out
as if I didn't have
control of my limbs,
and pulled it out of
its socket on the shelf.
I was seven years
old at this point.
I'd asked her to get rid
of this album many times,
and she refused,
bringing it with us
as we move from house to house.
The cover was made of
brown, woven grasses,
and because it was
old, the grasses
had started to
fray at the edges.
To me, too, this hinted at
the shame of the contents.
I suspected other
children didn't
have shameful books like
this around in their houses.
He and I sat down on
the flowered couch
beside each other.
"I want to show you
something," I said,
"just some photos of
my mother and me."
I opened the book across my
lap where he could see it.
My mother, younger, lying
on a bed with long hair
like dark water pooling
around her face.
These were the pictures
of my birth in black
and white with rounded corners.
She had what looked like
a man's shirt buttoned
around her chest, and she was
naked from the waist down,
with her legs bent and open in
the foreground of the photo.
I turned the page.
There I was, emerging from
between her glowing white legs
like a turtle rising
up from a pond.
In the following
pictures, once I was out,
you could see my body
wrinkled, my face wax-white,
asymmetrical, and squished.
I felt revulsion and
disgust, and yet I
continued to turn the
pages, I would not
have known how to articulate it.
I wanted to disgust him
the way I was disgusted,
to scare him away, to show him
who we were so that he might
leave now rather than wait.
"And here's more," I said
in my sweetest voice.
"Yes," he said, "I see."
He made no motion
to rise and run.
He sat, glancing at
the pages and then
looking away as if distracted.
When my mother came out of
the bathroom and saw us,
she snatched the
album from my hands
and stuck it back in
its place on the shelf,
giving me a furious look.
So I think one of
the things also
that I'm trying to
do with this book is
to get so particular about
my life that, in some ways,
it gets universal
so that people--
I think that the Steve Jobs
thing can be quite distracting
and people think, oh, my
life must be so different.
But then, when they read
it, it's not so different.
Usually people have complicated
people that they love,
and they have bumps in
the road of coming of age.
And I think in some
ways, the contrasts
are quite high in this
book, in my story.
But the more I hear from
other people and the more I--
and because I know people and
have friends and love people,
I know that people also
have stories like this,
even if they don't have the same
degree of notoriety, I guess.
But I had to use people in
my life that I loved to stand
in for other things, and I
was doing a reading actually
at my old high school, where
everyone who was in this memoir
was there-- it was
kind of terrifying--
and including my ex-boyfriend,
my high school boyfriend, who--
I wrote some things about him.
And I think he's certainly
a more interesting person
than on these pages.
On these pages, he's
in relation to me.
But what I was thinking about
his character in the book
is that he stands
for California.
Falling in love
with him is a way
of explaining the Bay
Area where I grew up.
And I'm sure lots of you--
I imagine lots of you
have been to the Bay Area,
because Google.
And actually, I
guess Google started
in the garage of my
journalism teacher.
And she ran the paper
in my high school,
and it hadn't started yet.
It was a twinkle in
someone's eye, I guess.
But it was just about
to start in these pages,
although I didn't know.
But anyway, this isn't
a story about Google.
This is a story about me.
So this is the story of
high school in the Bay Area,
and I was writing this book
from the cold wilds of Brooklyn
and imagining
sunshine and imagining
air that had perfume in it
of eucalyptus and bay laurel
and the grasses on the hills.
And it was a nice place
to live for a long time.
Now I'm going to have to
actually go back to Brooklyn
and live in Brooklyn.
But it was a nice way to
time travel, spend time
with my young parents,
and travel through space
and be in the Bay Area
again, which is so beautiful.
On the way home from
another visit to my school,
to "the" school,
my father suggested
that we stop at Palo Alto High
School, "Pally" for short,
just to see what it was like.
It was late in the afternoon
and school was out.
For a few minutes, we walked
around the empty quad.
Many of the buildings
looked like bunkers.
I felt uncomfortable, as
if we were trespassing.
But then we heard music
coming from somewhere,
and we followed it over
to where a tall boy was
standing beside the door, where
the music was coming from.
I was too shy to speak,
but my father asked,
"What's going on in here?"
And the boy said,
"It's the paper,"
and we peered into the room.
There were lots of people
inside working on computers
and lounging on
beanbags, and I thought
if I did decide to go here,
I'd work on the paper, too.
"You know what's
great about going
to school nearby your house?"
my father asked as we left.
"You can walk to it, like I did.
And if you walk a lot
over the course of time,
you get to see the
seasons change."
He said it in the same, slow
way he spoke of beautiful women,
but walking to school didn't
sound very romantic to me.
Nonetheless, I go to the school,
and now I'm in my senior year.
In my senior year
at Pally, I was
elected to the position of
editor in chief of the paper.
One day, in the
middle of the week,
there were technical problems.
The computer systems crashed.
The screens went dark.
The printer became inaccessible.
If the computers no longer
operated and would not reboot,
days of work would be lost--
all our carefully
designed pages.
Josh, his dirty blond hair
the color of a sand dune
worn in a thick ponytail,
laid down on the floor
to inspect and
arrange the wires.
The rest of us mulled in a
daze of terror and tragedy.
"Do you want to come?"
he asked me about a trip to his
house to get a missing cord.
I noticed Josh
more closely now--
dimples when he
smiled, wide shoulders
beneath flannel shirts.
He was shy and friendly and had
loose, complicated handwriting,
like the bouncing
string of a kite.
"Sure," I said, not knowing then
that he lived in Portola Valley
20 minutes away.
He seemed to me sloppy,
too relaxed, shambolic.
He could fix computers,
but he was disorganized,
forgetting to do his assignments
for Mrs. [? Paul's ?] English
class, whereas I was
meticulous, a grade grubber.
He never arrived
anywhere on time,
and he was hopeless
with a calendar,
wouldn't have his homework
and scrambled to do it
in the minutes before class.
Later, I would find out that he
was taking applied mathematics
and differential
equations at Stanford,
and he would be admitted to
college at Stanford and MIT,
so he was clearly fine.
He drove a used '83 Toyota
Supra in incandescent
teal with a pink sine wave
painted along both sides.
"Sorry about the paint
job," he said as we got in.
He bought it used from a
female physicist in Livermore.
He had nice hands on
the steering wheel.
His room had a mattress on the
floor and a window looking out
to a yard and the forest.
There were papers and
books strewn around,
a stack of stereo
equipment and headphones.
It was large enough to
seem empty and cluttered
at the same time.
He found the cord, and we left.
On the way back, we turned onto
[INAUDIBLE],, a two-lane road,
rough and patched, that wound
beside a nature preserve.
"I'm going to show you
a secret," he said.
"Hold on."
The speed limit was 25.
He began to accelerate.
We advanced toward
a blind corner where
the road rose up and
then disappeared,
a hill on one side,
a drop on the other.
The road curled back on itself
around the hill, out of sight.
Another car might be
advancing toward us
and smash into us at the bend.
A family of deer might
be walking across.
He continued to build
speed, shifting up--
third, fourth, fifth.
The car rumbled and whined.
"Are you sure you should be--"
"Don't worry," he yelled.
"I've done it before."
My mother sometimes said
there are guardian angels just
for teenagers.
"Oh, help me, God
of teenagers," I
thought, "oh God of teenagers."
"Hold on!" he yelled.
The car scraped.
The gears sang.
I gripped the top of the
seat belt in one hand,
the door handle in the other.
He shifted again, peeled
around the blind curve,
and then we flew.
It was because of the uneven
road, a raised portion followed
by a long dip downhill.
If you got up enough speed, you
could catch the lip of the up
and fly over the concavity,
through the dots of light cast
by the row of emerald
trees and bushes
growing alongside the road.
For me, the flight
unlidded the town.
There were hidden places of
freedom, and he knew them.
And then we're dating.
[CHUCKLING]
Sometimes in the late
afternoon after school,
during the weeks when we were
not producing the newspaper,
Josh and I went to
Windy Hill Preserve
up above skyline, hills wide and
yellow and soft like the humps
of camels, on one
side more hills,
like a blanket thrown out
into the wind, all the way
to the Pacific Ocean.
The town was a miniature
below us, silent and still
except for the singing,
rasping wind that
flattened the tall grasses.
A clear day, too much to
take in, the glassy air
and the feeling of great freedom
and grace, the world opening--
I looked north, and I could
see San Francisco sparkling
in the distance.
It was both close and
far away, something
to do with the
angle of this hill
to those hills, the
refraction of the light.
That's how I felt
about my parents
now that Josh was around--
not that I didn't worry
about my mom or my father
or what would happen when he
realized that I was really
leaving for college.
I was simply hovering
above it all so
it didn't pinch or press.
Now Josh was the one who drove
me to doctors appointments
or between houses.
He did not keep a calendar,
forgot about work assignments
and missed dentist appointments
and other appointments,
but never the ones with me.
I was protected
inside his teal Supra.
After the spring
rains, when the grasses
came up out of the claws of dirt
under the oak and eucalyptus
trees around Stanford,
viridian fuzz
like whiskers, stripes of gold
light in long, bright ribbons,
I thought, "This is my town."
I walked home after school and
noticed the seasons change.
Before this, it was my father's
town or my mother's town,
or the town where I'd
been placed by accident
and shifted around.
Now I was in love,
and the land was
dimensional and heavy
and particulate.
It belonged to me.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
AUDIENCE: Thanks.
That was awesome.
Thank you for the readings.
They were really great.
When you think about your dad,
how would you describe him?
LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: It's hard
to sum it up so quickly.
Very human, I would say.
It was interesting.
I was talking about
time traveling.
One thing you get to do
when you're writing a memoir
is you get to go and hang
out-- at least I did.
You get to go and hang
out with your parents
when they're younger
than you are now.
So you get to notice
that they're human,
and one thing that
I noticed was that--
so my father wasn't really
around when I was very little.
I was unexpected, unwanted, and
my parents were both so young.
And his career trajectory was
just beginning then and really
starting to ramp up,
as far as I understand.
So he wasn't around.
And then, at a
certain point, he must
have made a pretty
clear decision
to come back and be
a part of my life.
And I think for
me, at the time--
and you will see in the book--
it was very awkward.
We wanted to get
to know each other,
but I think he was very
young and didn't really know
how to be with kids, and
I had been dreaming of him
for so long that it was
like I wanted him to arrive
on the scene with a real bam.
And he was, in some
ways, the dream father
in the sense of being
the father you dream
about when you don't have one.
He was famous, and
he was rich, and he
was incredibly charismatic,
and he was handsome,
and he drove a Porsche.
And so it's kind of like
this realer-than-real,
larger-than-life arrival.
But in another way,
it was disappointing
because he was so awkward.
There were these long pauses.
And I went back as
a part of this book
and watched this
next presentation.
It was the introduction
to the next,
I think, at Davies Symphony
Hall in San Francisco.
And I had already
written about it,
but I wanted to watch
the presentation
because I wanted to make
sure that what I'd remembered
was correct.
And I'm not really a
Steve Jobs completionist,
so I don't really watch
his old presentations.
I was there at some of
them, and the other ones,
he was my father,
not this figure.
But I got myself to
watch the presentation,
and I'd remembered looking
at him from the perspective
of a daughter and him being
kind of amazing and larger
than life.
And then when I watched the
presentation again on YouTube,
he was incredible.
I was like, oh, wow, he
really was incredible.
This wasn't just the
perspective of a daughter.
He seemed so at ease in
front of so many people.
And so I guess--
this is kind of a terrible word,
but so relatable, so simple
and human at the
same time as being
so sparkling and incredible.
And so set against our
personal interactions
when we were getting to
know each other, we were--
the first time I was
going to stay at his house
overnight because my
mother was taking a class,
and I went to his company and
waited for him for a while.
Then we got in his car,
in his amazing Porsche,
and drove to his mansion.
And the whole drive,
he didn't say a word.
And at the time,
I thought maybe it
was something I
did, or maybe if I
had been more of a
conversationalist,
or maybe he was mad at me.
And I realized, looking
back as an adult, spending
time with this
young, awkward man,
that he actually just was
kind of doing his best,
and he was quite human.
So it was wonderful to have
certain revelations like that,
to give myself
permission to understand
who he might have been
as a father and a person
and where he might
have been coming
from as a complicated
and incomplete person
as we all are.
I hope that answers
your question.
Again, I'm the last person
to talk about his work life,
right?
AUDIENCE: I feel like when you
look back at your childhood,
a lot of people
have patchy memories
or may have remembered
something incorrectly,
that then somebody tells you
the story later, an older
adult that may have been there.
So I'm wondering if you had
more of those revelations
as you were writing about
them, things that you thought
happened a certain way,
and then as you started
to describe them, you
realized, actually, that's not
at all what happened.
Did you have moments like that?
And what was one
that was interesting?
LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: I'm sure
I did have moments like that.
So what happens is it's really
hard to remember so many things
from your life, and I
wasn't sure at the beginning
I had enough memory to write a
whole book about my childhood.
It's a coming-of-age book, so it
ends when I leave for college,
and I was terrified.
But it turns out, when you start
to sit down and think and work
at it and write, something
about writing also helps.
You get one story,
and then another one
connects to that story, and
then another one connects.
And after a while, you have a
whole constellation of stories.
And if you kind of pull this
end, this end kind of trembles.
So I probably wrote seven
books for this book, stories
that helped me get to a
place, but that, in the end,
weren't necessary,
didn't merit inclusion.
And I'm looking for the
stories in my life that
stand for several things,
maybe stories that
are kind of metaphors as well.
And there was one time--
my father used always
used to say, "Leese,
you're going to remember this."
And I thought, what am
I, the record keeper?
But also, I thought, oh,
God, I hope I remember.
Why would I remember
this particular moment?
Because some of the
moments were very
poignant, perhaps, for him,
and they weren't for me.
And so I didn't quite
understand what was going on.
And there was one moment when
we were on a vacation in Hawaii.
I think I was maybe nine.
And he'd been-- especially
when I looked at this book
and researched it,
I understood he'd
been wavering back and
forth about his paternity.
It had been proven
by a DNA test,
but he still was saying he
wasn't my father in public
and to other people in private.
But there was this moment
when we were in Hawaii,
and I do remember him sort
of pointing out body parts
and saying, look, we
have the same this
and we have the same this.
And I remember he wanted to
sort of sit there for a while,
and his arm around my waist
kind of felt like a seat belt
because I wanted to run and leap
and jump to the desserts table.
And I thought, why is he
keeping me-- this heaviness?
And I talked with his
ex-girlfriend, Tina,
and she remembered that time
too with a little more clarity.
And she also was telling
me that he was even
saying to her that he wasn't
necessarily my father,
and it was at that
moment, because she
was there too, that she saw
that he was kind of claiming me.
And so I had remembered
some part of that moment
from my child's perspective, but
the full import of that scene
was not apparent until I went
back and did some research
and understood what
was really going on.
And it was wonderful to be able
to layer my childhood memories
and feelings and desires
and longings with the woman
that I am now who knows
so much more about people
and who can understand
more of what's going on.
It was like I could keep
my child self company.
I don't know if it
happens for you guys,
but sometimes things
happen when you're a kid
and you don't know
what they mean.
And so it's those things that
you keep and preserve and bring
forward into your
adulthood, maybe
because you hope at
some point you'll
have the information
and the wisdom
and the knowledge to be able to
sort of open up those mysteries
and make sense of them later.
And so the process
of writing really
was a process of opening up
all these long closed boxes
and seeing what was inside.
And sometimes what was inside
was a run-of-the-mill story,
and sometimes what was inside
was more than I had anticipated
and changed my own
perspective of my past.
And I guess I do hope to do
that for other people reading
the book also.
I hope to maybe change
other people's perspective
or deepen their own
awareness or their memories
of their own past.
I think it's definitely
happened for people who grew up
in California
because they're like,
the smells, because I have
so many smells in this book,
maybe too many smells.
But I think childhood also has
a lot of these mysteries in it.
There's a thing you
do as a kid, I guess.
You use anything you've got
because you don't really
have much.
So remembering all the times
I kind of subtly and not
so subtly tried to use my
father's fame to prop myself
up-- how embarrassing is that?
And then, trying to forgive
that young person for--
or be able to chuckle
at the young person
for doing whatever she
could do and being scrappy.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: So another
funny connection--
your journalism
teacher, I believe,
is [INAUDIBLE],, one of whose
daughters is YouTube CEO.
Another daughter was
married to Sergey Brin,
I think, for a little while.
To what extent were
these connections
to the rest of Silicon Valley
connected as part of your life?
LISA BRENNAN-JOBS:
Google was beginning
in her garage I think around
the time I was graduating,
or maybe just about
when I went to college,
and I had just about no idea.
So amazing things can
be happening around you,
and you can not know
about them, even if you're
right in the epicenter of them.
I don't think anyone
particularly knew.
So yes, that was [INAUDIBLE].
And I was saying I had an
event at my high school
with [INAUDIBLE] the other
day, and almost everyone
in the memoir was
there, which I can
tell you is kind of terrifying.
But I'm relating to
my story as the story
of a girl with a father
and a mother growing up
in California at that time,
not as the story of a titan,
nor of a Silicon Valley guru.
I get to talk about how Silicon
Valley was because I lived it.
But I certainly was not a
part of the business aspect.
I guess that's interesting
in its own way.
I remember coming
back in college--
and it was during the first
dot.com boom, I think--
and noticing that every
other car was a Ferrari,
and there were
lots of high heels.
And I'd never seen
high heels in Palo Alto
before that, so I was like, wow,
what's happened to my place?
And now, going back, of
course, it's vastly different.
I think this is more
of a story everyone
can relate with, even though
it has dramatic ups and downs.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: You've talked about
how you looked at your father
and you were trying
to from the outside
learn how he was feeling
about being your father,
like the thing with the arm.
I was wondering if
you've ever actually
had an open conversation
with him about this,
if you ever asked him why it was
so difficult for him to accept
that he is your father.
LISA BRENNAN-JOBS:
That's a good question.
It was hard to talk with
him about things like that.
He said that he wasn't
so good at communicating.
And there was a kind
of wonderful moment--
the end of the book.
I'd been waiting for
this Hollywood moment.
He was so sick, and I'd been
waiting for some sort of moment
of reconciliation.
And of course, I
knew I was an idiot
because when do you get those
moments that are in the movies,
right?
When the person says, I'm sorry,
or I understand how you felt.
But still, I was waiting for
it, so I kept on returning home.
And I think that's
why I was pilfering
these objects, because I
felt things weren't complete.
But I couldn't really get
that conversation out of him,
and I was terrified.
When we had talked about it
earlier, he'd said things like,
just move on.
He said at some point he was
sorry, and he said he loved me,
but it somehow wasn't
enough for what
felt like a kind of
tidal wave of grief,
actually, that we'd missed
each other for so long.
So when he was dying, I
went back a month before.
And finally, we had a kind of
amazing moment where he said,
"I really owe you one,"
over and over again.
And it's such an odd
phrase, "I owe you one."
He hadn't really said it
before, and I kept on wondering,
what is the one?
And he was also sad because he
hadn't really spent the time,
he said, and the
problem with dying
is I guess it's kind
of like a final end.
So if you haven't spent the
time before that happens,
then it's too late, you know?
So that felt very
meaningful, like OK, we're
on the same page.
We missed something here.
And I wish it had happened
earlier because it would
have been nice to be friends.
It would've been nice to
have a feeling that he
had been unburdened
of this feeling
earlier so that we
were on the same page,
because we actually
really liked each other
and had some great
times together.
He was also really funny, and he
was enjoyable to be with a lot.
We had a lot of
fun on our skates,
and it felt like it was very
lucky, in some ways, that I
lived with him
during high school
because even though, as
you'll see in the book,
I am full-on in the midst
of adolescent angst,
I realized if we hadn't
lived together then,
we wouldn't have gotten to know
each other as well as we did.
And that contains its
own kind of resolution,
because I guess if you know
someone more as a person,
their flaws become
more understandable,
and they perhaps become
less personal, I guess.
I did feel-- and I write
about this in the book.
But I did feel that I'd
been hearing about--
sometimes people
imitate my father
by imitating his wardrobe,
or they imitate maybe
some of the ways he could be
caustic and sharp and difficult
and sometimes cruel.
And from my
experience, the sense
that he had an extremely
sensitive part--
very dear, very kind,
very simple, very caring.
And it was from
that part, as far
as I could tell by knowing
some of his work colleagues
and by knowing him
to the degree that I
did-- it was from that
part from which he created.
And so I wondered if perhaps
some of the imitations
of the caustic part--
if that part was the
part that was protecting
this ultra-sensitive core.
And so if the imitations,
in that sense,
are a bit misguided.
AUDIENCE: Given that you
and your dad didn't--
he didn't fully
accept you as his kid
until you were a
little bit older, how
did you deal with
that reconciliation
from your perspective,
both when you were a kid
and then as an adult when
you had more perspective?
LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: I think this
book is going to answer so many
of your questions,
but in a subtle way.
So I think I thought I had
gotten over it, sort of,
because we had had a lot
of good times together,
and he'd apologized,
and we liked each other,
and we used to tease each other.
But then, certain funny
things kept on happening.
Like I was enraged that
he wouldn't get a couch.
We had chairs.
We had places to sit,
but my mother and I
had been sort of nomadic.
We'd been a little bit rootless.
We'd been searching for a
home, and so we didn't really
have a couch.
We'd sort of taken one
from him at some point
and then carted this sort
of horrible couch around,
but this feeling that he owed
me a couch was so profound.
So I would complain
bitterly about the couches,
and I felt so sad about it and
so deeply owed and so enraged,
disproportionate to what
a couch actually is.
And I think that my sense of
grief about having lost him
became blame, became anger,
and would sort of attach itself
to these odd objects.
So in that sense, I think, it
took a while to understand,
to get under the skin of
my own strange frustrations
and understand that
loss might have
been at the root
of them, which was
kind of another revelation
of writing the book.
Oh, right, why was I so
fixated on the couch?
Oh, right, because I hadn't had
a father during all that time.
I don't really tell
you this in the book,
but I think it
becomes kind of clear.
Did you want to
ask a question too?
AUDIENCE: Sure.
My interest, I guess, is do
you have technology and use
technology in your life?
Do you have an iPhone, or do
you have an Android device?
There's lots of folks here that
work on a competitive product.
And as a new mom,
do you have a plan
for how you're going to deal
with technology with your kids?
LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: First
of all, I have an iPhone
and I'm slightly bitter
because the new ones seem
to be so large, and I
have the smallest hands.
And so it kind of
slips a bit, so maybe I
need to get an Android
and solve that.
No.
[CHUCKLING]
I can say that--
and I love the
camera on the iPhone,
and I wrote my book on
an Apple, and I love it.
But when I was
writing, it was very
difficult to interact with
the insta-texting world
while I was doing deeper work.
It would sort of pull me
out of profound thinking.
So I would leave my phone
at a cafe down the street.
And I was actually
dating at the time,
which made really
difficult to date
when you don't have a phone.
But I would leave it at a
cafe, and they would hold it
for me, which is so odd, right?
Sometimes for days at a time.
Because sometimes you get to
a hard place in your writing,
and you realize you're
writing really badly.
And it feels like if you look
at your phone and you can text
with your friends or you can
look at some article that
you've sort of solved
the problem, but in fact,
you haven't.
You kind of have to
sit with the misery
of your own bad
sentences for a while.
They become good,
but they started bad
because I didn't know
where I was coming from.
So hiding away my
phone was very useful,
and sort of turning off
the internet for a while
was useful.
So the relationship I
have with my devices
is close, but intermittent.
And I've tried when I'm nursing
and when I'm with my son
not to be on the phone,
and me and our babysitter
have talked about trying
not to do that so much when
we're with him, because it feels
as if you're giving someone
concentrated attention,
but of course, you're not.
And I find the easiest
solution is to get rid of it
for-- he's crying.
He's like-- sorry.
That's my son.
[CHUCKLING]
So I'm hoping for future books
it's not so fraught, that I'm
able to put my phone
in the other room
and ignore it for a while.
But I found with
this book, I had
to either leave it
at a cafe, or later,
lock it in a food addictions
box for a time, which you
can get on Amazon, actually--
probably other places, too.
[CHUCKLING]
So I wouldn't say love/hate, but
intermittent and close, maybe.
Yes?
AUDIENCE: So I was
thinking about this.
You and your family, and
especially your father,
have been portrayed numerous
times in film and television.
And have you paid
attention to any of this?
It must be weird.
How do you feel about it,
just in general thoughts?
LISA BRENNAN-JOBS: I
assiduously avoid it.
I didn't see the Sorkin movie,
and I didn't read the Isaacson
biography, and I don't read
the books about my father.
I figure there's a scene in
"Pee-wee's Big Adventure."
My dad and I used to watch that.
And they make a movie about
Pee-wee at the end of his big
adventure, and Dotty, his
friend, says, "Pee-wee,
aren't you going to
watch your movie?"
And he says, "I
don't have to, Dotty.
I lived it."
So something like that.
But also, I was
working on a book,
and I thought, sometimes
you can look at a picture
and it informs your own memory.
You stop remembering
what you remember
and you start
remembering the picture.
And I felt it was very
important to not interact
with other people's
interpretations of my father's
life with me as a bit character,
because it was already
a courageous act to decide I
got to be a main character.
I think people will sometimes
pick up this book thinking
that they're getting a
book about Steve Jobs,
and they will be plunged
into the coming-of-age sagas
of a girl, which I
think is wonderful.
Maybe it's a book some
people wouldn't normally buy.
But I'm actually finding men
are liking it a lot, too, which
I was hoping for, and
which surprises me
because it is so specifically
about a woman or a girl.
But yeah, I don't
interact with them,
and I don't have
difficulty avoiding press.
Even during this book tour,
I've had to keep my equanimity,
and the way I've done
that is by not reading
any reviews or press,
because when I think of it,
I sort of get a
pit in my stomach.
It's hard to be part of another
person's narrative, which
is part of the reason I felt
heavy hearted about writing
my own narrative, because other
people would be a part of it.
And I've done the
best I could with it.
And I think we do have the
right to write our own stories
or to come to terms
with our own stories,
but we don't necessarily
have the obligation
to participate in the
stories of others.
AUDIENCE: I have
three daughters,
and I'm pretty comfortable with
my own passion for technology.
I don't really share
much of that with them.
So I'm just kind
of wondering, you
having a father as very
passionate about technology,
what were your common grounds?
How did you connect
with each other?
Because we have
our things we do,
because I know they're not
interested in all my technology
enthusiasm.
LISA BRENNAN-JOBS:
You're like, gadgets?
No.
More gadgets?
No.
Yeah, I think people are
looking for connection and love
and humor from their
parents and their fathers.
And the gadgets are such a
means to something, right?
They're not an end,
and they certainly
don't replace human contact,
would be my thought.
So my father was, when
he was on his game,
totally delightful to
hang out with because he
was interested and curious
about a ton of things.
And I guess the
way technology is
the best, from my
perspective, is
that it can help with
that kind of curiosity
and that kind of
investigation, but it doesn't
replace curiosity or hanging
out together or spending time
together.
And I think in my
experience of my father,
he was not an exception to that.
He did not seem gadget obsessed.
He knew that I wasn't going
to talk with him for hours
about the iPhone.
So we would take skates
and talk about roses
and talk about architecture
and talk about fonts
and talk about Palo Alto,
and he seemed very interested
in those things.
And I guess interest and
curiosity are infectious.
So I think you're doing great.
Thank you so much for coming.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
