Dubai, UAE, September 16, 2018:  On the latest episode of ‘Amanpour’, Christiane Amanpour talks to Lisa Brennan-Jobs, daughter of the late co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs.

 

Brennan-Jobs spoke of the complicated relationship she shared with her father, who had denied paternity for several years. After watching from the sidelines as her story was told by authors and film directors, Brennan-Jobs has decided to share her own stories of one of tech’s greatest visionaries through her new memoir “Small Fry.”

 

 

Lisa Brennan-Jobs on the message she is trying to convey through “Small Fry”:

 

“It’s a story of a girl growing up, coming of age, in California in the 80s and 90s in Silicon Valley against a back drop of a complicated family and it starts when I’m really young and goes to when I go away to college… The title is kind of a term of endearment and it’s also a term of, it also kind of means insignificance.”

 

On why her father disputed paternity:

 

“One of the things about this book is that I tell all my stories as a girl and all my feelings growing up but that doesn’t mean I know all the answers… He [Steve Jobs] was young and starting his rocket ship career. I don’t imagine I fit into that so well.”

 

Brennan-Jobs responding to a statement by the Jobs’ family who argue against the portrayal of Steve Jobs in her book:

 

“I realised that I had been written about since I was three years old and so I do know it’s a strange feeling and sometimes it doesn’t feel so good when someone else takes a part of your life and writes about it. A slice of your own life… I wanted to write this book, I thought a lot about it and I believe that people have the right to tell their own story and it is very much my own story, there is a famous guy in it who was my father, but this is the story of my complicated family and growing up and it’s 400 pages of whispering in libraries and dangly earrings and, you know, the difficulties of adultescence.”

 

For many years, Steve Jobs denied the Lisa computer was named after his daughter and Brennan-Jobs remembers when he finally admitted the truth:

 

“We went to go have lunch with someone, he wouldn’t say who it was and then it turned out to be Bono… and we went to have lunch with him and at some point they were talking about the beginnings of things… and Bono looked over to my father and said ‘Oh, that Lisa computer was named after her wasn’t it?’ and I paused bracing myself for what I knew would be the answer which would be to disappointment everyone, no it wasn’t actually named after me it’s just a coincidence and then my father paused and said ‘yes it was’. I thought oh my gosh, oh right of course it was, oh that makes sense and also why did it take a famous person… to reveal his secret.”

 

Brennan-Jobs on whether she has fully accepted her dad:

 

“Acceptance is another thing. I think it’s been wonderful to examine our relationship and write about it and live in it again because I do feel another level of acceptance but I wonder if it’s for him or if it’s for myself that I felt ashamed of certain things and of certain ways I couldn’t connect with him and then going back over and doing the book I found some sort of joyful resolution.”