Remember that one person at parties who would flaunt his Rolex watch or her Gucci handbag? At first it looks appealing, but gradually— when all they would talk about is that one watch or handbag— it all starts to feel banal. You want to scratch the surface and see beyond it.
For Lisa Brennan-Jobs, her father Steve Jobs is that prized possession. ‘Steve Jobs is my father. He named a computer after me. He is rich and famous and I want to be a bright kid at least in his eyes.’ You lose count of how many times the author, Lisa, states this.
Journalist Janvi Sonaiya “The book takes time to take off and as a reader even you take time to keep Steve Jobs’s larger-than-life image aside and look at him like any other human being—a child from a dysfunctional family failing to not give a similar fate for his children.” Sonaiya has been in the media industry for seven years. She hails from the small town of Saurashtra, Jam-Khambhalia and has shifted to Ahmedabad to make a career. She has worked in The Times Group (Ahmedabad Mirror), Divya Bhaskar, DNA newspaper, Desh Gujarat and other publications.
“Written in an anecdotal way, Lisa introduces us to her artist mother Chrisann Brennan and a father who refused to accept her i.e. Steve. Growing up between an emotionally unavailable mother, poverty, oscillating between the changing partners in her parents’ lives, absence of a reliable adult around, and the constant attempt to please her ‘affluent’ dad, results in a scenario where you want to protect this child.” adds Sonaiya. She is currently working in a digital media startup, Vibes of India. Her investigative stories have been published in The Wire, CNN, Al-Jazeera, NBC News and other media platforms.
The graph of the relationship between Steve and Lisa undoubtedly makes for a good story but we hardly get a glimpse of who Lisa is if we remove her famous dad from her existence.
As a reader who has grown up getting goosebumps from Steve’s ‘Here’s to the crazy one’ speech, we try to accept a different version of him. He advises his pre-teen child to masturbate, he refuses to pay Lisa’s university fees; he compels her to choose a vacation in Hawaii instead of classes at Harvard and most importantly he accepts his inability to express love.
We paused a little more when Lisa, still a child, feels lonely at night and requests Steve and Lawrence for a good night kiss. The couple obliges to the request once but also accepts, “Lis, we are just cold people’.
It makes you realise how flawed human beings are, or how fragile relationships can be and the best we can do is to enjoy the ride be it in life or in a book.
