Small Fry

My sister gave me Lisa Brennan-Jobs’ bombshell memoir about the author’s father, Steve Jobs, several Christmases ago, and it sat on my bedside table until recently. I didn’t anticipate it being, at its core, a book about childrearing. I’ve written before about “good enough” parenting and how helpful the process of elimination can be in defining it. There are lots of reasonable ways to parent, and then there is this.

Unflinching and eviscerating, Small Fry is replete with cautionary tales. I identified with Brennan-Jobs as she weathered the ‘80s and ‘90s with parents who took to an extreme that era’s propensity to not put children first. Her mother says, “I lost my twenties,” and then, “I want my own friends, my own life,” and Brennan-Jobs remembers feeling, “My happiness had been pulled from the reserve of hers, a limited string we had to share.”

Of her father, she writes, “We all made allowance for his eccentricities, the ways he attacked other people, because he was also brilliant, and sometimes kind and insightful. Now I felt he’d crush me if I let him. He would tell me how little I meant over and over until I believed it. What use was his genius to me?” She’s a talented writer, gifted enough to describe what it feels like to be at the mercy of a mercurial externalizer, the way air can change in an instant.

Brennan-Jobs occasionally indulges in pettiness and only a handful of the book’s many characters are ultimately portrayed sympathetically. And yet, Small Fry rings true—deeply, horribly true.