USA Today proclaimed that “there’s no way to read and not feel complete sympathy and sadness.” Business Insider argued that “what she endured was something many people would now consider child abuse.” (It really says something when part of a book review’s URL reads, “steve-jobs-terrible.”) On the Today show this morning - a massive platform not generally available to debut authors - Hoda Kotb could not stop herself from pressing Brennan-Jobs repeatedly about her father’s heartlessness. Reviewers of a less literary bent have latched onto the details of callousness oozing out of the memoir, as you might expect, and turned a firehose of empathy on Brennan-Jobs. The book is ubiquitous - covered by Esquire, Time, and of course, People. On his deathbed, a time when many fathers would be revelling in the beauty of the life they had created, Jobs told his daughter that she “smelled like a toilet.” And contra Sorkin’s movie, there was no full reconciliation. neglect and maltreatment she suffered at the hands of her father. Its author, profiled by both the New York Times and the Guardian, details the B.A.N.A.N.A.S. Her memoir, Small Fry, the sleeper critical hit of the season, has been excerpted in Vanity Fair. But this week, Lisa Brennan-Jobs herself demolished it. That façade began to crumble in the wake of Walter Isaacson’s 2011 biography (and Aaron Sorkin’s ambivalent adaptation four years later). If he was anybody else we’d call him a deadbeat dad, but because he was his holiness Steve Jobs, his reputation as the patron saint of handheld technology remained intact. Four days after finally accepting the results and agreeing to $385 a month in child support, he took Apple public, “and overnight,” she writes in the memoir, “my father was worth more than $200 million.”

Jobs famously lacked what Jennifer Aniston would have referred to as his “sensitivity chip.” He refused to acknowledge Lisa for years - her mother “supplemented her welfare payments by cleaning houses and waitressing” - then demanded paternity tests. Steve Jobs’s official bio for Apple left out his oldest daughter, Lisa, who was born to a former girlfriend on a farm in 1978.

Small Fry by Lisa Brennan-Jobs