Debut Author Spotlight: Lisa Brennan-Jobs

Lisa Brennan-Jobs is a writer whose byline has appeared in Vogue and the Los Angeles Times. She's also the daughter of Steve Jobs, Apple's cofounder and tech icon. In her new memoir, Small Fry, Brennan-Jobs candidly describes growing up in the shadow of the often mercurial Jobs.

She talked to Goodreads about how writing the book helped her understand her personal history better, and why her memoir isn't a tell-all but a coming-of-age story.

Goodreads: Summarize your book for readers.

Lisa Brennan-Jobs: Small Fry is a coming-of-age story about a girl growing up in '80s and '90s California, against the backdrop of a complicated family with an artist mother and a well-known father. I hope to convey how alive and dazzling my parents were, and also show the real texture of a life. In the book I am flawed and spirited, navigating my way toward adulthood and independence.

The book starts when I'm little and ends (mostly) when I leave for college. There are some long roller-skating trips, some minor theft, couches; more seriously, there is a wish to belong and a stubborn adolescent rejection of the reality of what is.

Goodreads: Tell us a little bit about yourself and how you became a writer.

LBJ: My aunt is a writer [Mona Simpson], and there is beauty and precision to the way that she lives and writes that I admire. I started reading late, around age eight, and that was only because I discovered there were kissing scenes. I read for those scenes. After I started reading more, my writing improved and I received positive feedback in school.

I got a job as an investment banker out of college, and someone commented that I had too many facial expressions for that line of work.

GR: Why did you decide to write about your life and your father?

LBJ: I wanted to write a universal story—most families are complicated, most children are longing for something, even without a famous person around.

I got to time travel, to spend days with my young parents again and observe them from a new perspective. When I was a girl, they were younger then than I am now.

My mother kept insisting that if you don't understand your history, you will repeat it. After a while I understood that it was important to sort through the past because I wanted to have a different kind of family.

GR: Tell us about your research and the writing process for your memoir.

LBJ: When I first got the book contract many years ago, I was terrified because I was sure I didn't remember enough stories to fill a book. It was my big, awful secret. But then I spent time thinking about the stories I could remember and wrote them down, and these stories connected to other stories, and soon there was a constellation. Later I created timelines of my stories against known events and spoke with people I knew in my childhood. I covered walls in sticky notes with help from a filmmaker friend to understand the chronology and shape the structure. My friend Jamie Quatro helped me cut, shined up the prose, and encouraged me to write some important stories I hadn’t written yet.

I probably wrote seven rambling books to get to this one.

Early on, some of the stories about my adolescence came out as lumps of self-pity. It turns out that when you seek pity in memoir, it doesn't work, it just doesn't ring true. I had to get more honest about why I felt badly—sometimes it was guilt. Usually I'd played some part in what made me feel sad, and when I admitted it to myself, the story opened up.

GR: What are some of your favorite memoirs, and did you find yourself influenced by any particular memoirs?

LBJ: I love West with the Night, Out of Africa, and Running in the Family. I also love personal essays (bite-size memoirs) by Phillip Lopate, George Orwell, James Baldwin, and Natalia Ginzburg, among many others.

I read This Boy's Life again and realized that the more devious little Tobias was, the more I adored him. This gave me courage to remember and reveal my own deviousness.

GR: What do you hope readers take away from reading Small Fry?

LBJ: I hope that people will come away a bit less ashamed of their foibles, having read about mine—my awkward jokes about hot tubs, bragging to get attention, lying, sneaking, and self-pity. I also hope that people will feel less alone in their loneliness. Books have done that for me. I hope it gives pleasure and insight.

GR: So much has been written about Steve Jobs. Why write more?

LBJ: This is a coming-of-age story about a girl, not a tell-all about a famous man.

I write to understand what the truth is for me. I felt ashamed to be the dark side of someone's brilliant story—and I wanted to write, in part, to understand that. I also felt (and sometimes still feel) ashamed to be the kid of a famous person writing a memoir. These two are in conflict.

Writing about myself as if I'm important seems pretentious, and focusing on myself when there are huge issues in the world that need solving, issues beyond the reaches of this genre, seems selfish and indulgent. The way I have come to terms with the last one is that this planet is fractal. Large and small stories relate. Patterns repeat. Sorting out one's own story has larger implications, and so it is meaningful.

Despite the hard times, there was a lot of joy and wonder in my childhood, and my father was a big part of that. When he was truly present with me, on a four-hour skate in a time before devices or looking at roses or serifs, there was nothing better.

GR: What are you currently reading, and what books are you recommending to your friends?

LBJ: I'm a new parent—my son was born almost four months ago—so I read snippets of baby books, including the soulful D.W. Winnicott. I'd forgotten how incredible Peter Pan is, with that kiss you can't have on the right side of Mrs. Darling's mouth.

Over the past few months, I've read and loved Jamie Quatro's Fire Sermon and Joseph O'Neill's new book of stories, Good Trouble (I laughed out loud). I love the new River Cafe Cookbook. I read the birth scene in Karl Ove Knausgård's My Struggle, book two, just before I went into labor myself.

GR: What's next for you? Any preview you can give readers?

LBJ: Nonfiction, and not about myself. Mercy.