March 12, 2020 • 34 mins
For most of her young life, Lisa Brennan-Jobs bounced back and forth between two very different homes—that of her mother, who raised Lisa alone for the first few years of her life and struggled to make ends meet; and that of her father, Steve Jobs, who lived exactly the way you’d expect the founder of a multimillion dollar tech company to but struggled to relate to the daughter he initially denied was his.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio. In
between visits, I saw my father all around New York.
I saw him sitting in a movie theater, the exact
curve of his neck to jaw to cheekbone. I saw
him as I ran along the Hudson River in winter,
(00:20):
sitting on a bench looking at the dock boats, and
on my subway, revived the work, walking away on the
platform through the crowd, thin men, olive skinned, fine fingered,
slim wristed, double bearded, who at certain angles looked just
like him. Each time I had to get closer to
check my heart in my throat, even though I knew
it could not possibly be him, because he was sick
(00:43):
in bed in California. Before this, during years in which
we hardly spoke, I had seen his picture everywhere. Seeing
the pictures gave me a strange thing. The feeling was
familiar to catching a glimpse of myself in a mirror
across the room and thinking it was someone else, and
then realizing it was my own faith Darry was peering
(01:03):
up for magazines and newspapers and screens in whatever city
I was in. That is my father, and no one
knows it, but it's true. That's Lisa Brennan Jobs, reading
from her first memoir, Small Fry. Lisa's story is both
about having a secret and being a secret. What's your
(01:23):
life like when your father, the father who initially did
not believe you were his, The father who only reluctantly
claimed you after he was forced to take a fraternity test,
The father who kept you at arm's length all your life,
is one of the most famous, powerful, and wealthiest men
in the world. Here's just a bit more from Lisa
(01:45):
before we dive into our conversation. I have a secret,
I said to my new friends at school. I whispered
it so they would see I was reluctant to mention it.
The key I felt was to underplay. My father is
Steve Jobs. Who is that? One asked, He's famous? I said,
he invented the personal computer. He lives in a mansion
(02:05):
and drives a Porsche convertible. He buys a new one
every time I gets a scratch. The story had a
film of unreality to it, as I said it, even
to my own ears. I hadn't hung out with him
that much, only a few skates and visits. I didn't
have the clothes or the bike. Someone with a father
like this would have. My last name was different from his.
(02:26):
He even named a computer after me. I said to them,
what computer. A girl named Elizabeth asked the Lisa. I said,
a computer called the Lisa. She said, I never heard
of it. It was ahead of its time. I used
my mother's phrase, although I wasn't sure why it was ahead.
He visited the personal computer later. But you can't tell
(02:48):
anyone because if someone finds out, I could get kidnapped.
I brought it up when I felt I needed to,
waiting as long as I could, and then letting it
burst forth. I don't remember feeling at a disadvantage with
my friends who had others, only that there was at
my fingertips another magical identity, an extra thing that started
to itch and tangle when I felt small, and it
(03:09):
was like a pressure building inside me. And then I
had to find a way to say it. She had
to find a way to say it. Isn't that what
this show is all about? So many of us are
trying to find a way to say it. Whatever it is,
this thing that wasn't allowed to be spoken. I'm Danny Shapiro,
(03:38):
and this is family secrets. The secrets that are kept
from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
secrets we keep from ourselves. So I missed it a lot. Actually,
the air in California and northern California knows of disks.
They're towering and there's silvery, and they have these size
(04:03):
in half moon knees that dangle down and shiver in
the wind. And they have these beautiful kind of button
shaped seeds that plunk on those ceilings and fall on
the roads, and they are kind of silvery too, and perfumed.
My mother was saying that they're not native to the
(04:24):
area and that their roots systems are really shallow, so
they can fall over. She said this when I was younger,
and I I held onto this idea, and I remember
when we would drive to the beach, which was up
this curvy road all the way over the hills and
then down to the Pacific Ocean. There was a line
of eucalyptus trees, and every time we would have to
(04:46):
go through that long tree lined road, I would hold
my breath with terror that these trees would fall down
on us. And then many years later said, oh, no, sweetheart,
no trees falling very slowly, but anyway, the air smelled
the people lift and danger. The earliest home I think
(05:06):
I remember was this place as the sort of the
batch house of the house in Memmo Park and no
are remember being in a shower with my mother and
she was the hot water and the cold water were
coming on. We were alternating them for some reason, and
she was yelling like closed poors, open pours, and I
was yelling it with her, and I think there was
a curtain, and then we would go outside. At that
(05:27):
house there was theater. The house was small that there
was quite the garden because the main house was surrounded
by land. This house is a kind of house on
spilt on a hill that was really falling apart a
little bit, the one with the trellis roses, and there
was ivy on one side where I would go and
play beside the big oak tree on my own. Or
(05:47):
was the boy who lived there with his mother also
we were renting a room. And now that house has
been all fixed up. It looks really nice because that
doesn't look anymore like it's going to fall down the
hill or like the wood is old. It looks like
a shiny, polished version of its old self when we
lived in a bunch of houses. I think I've removed
(06:09):
searching times before I was seven, but by the time
I was seven. What was it like to move thirteen
times in the first seven years of your life? I
mean both what was it like then? And like, how
do you think about that now? It's hard to know
what it was like then. I remember my mother being
very sad. I think maybe she was probably depressed and
(06:29):
probably just completely overwhelmed with our money less circumstances, and
how she would kind of sit in one of these
rooms in the dark, and I would feel embarrassed because
in this one's house that we're moving into, it was
our own house. We were the ones who had our
name on the lease, and I remember the des fiction,
oh my god, we're moving into a place that's just ours.
(06:51):
And I also remember noticing that we really didn't have
any furniture. So I had these moments of feeling a
distance from my own circumstances and of irthing them, maybe
because I've been to other people's houses. We lived at
one place over the summer that was full of furniture.
We stub led it from somewhere too was away, and
they had a television, and I remember watching Jethany Street
(07:12):
and they had so much furniture that right now, the
way I imagine it was the kind of a hoarder's paradise,
but in fact it might have just been a very well,
normally furnished house. You know. It wasn't necessarily something I
was looking at anthropologically, because it was my life and
I was so young I didn't really know any different.
And yet there were ploys when I remember thinking, oh,
that's different than what might be normal. And I think
(07:36):
that children will take these moments that are mysterious and
sort of box them up for later. And I think
that because I think during the process of writing a
memoir it was it was an unboxing. In other words,
the stories that I would remember, we're the ones that
where things happened that does not make sense to me
at the time, and that is why I had wrapped
(07:56):
them up and saved them for all that time. One
of these boxed up moments happens in a car after
Lisa and her mom have taken a road trip to
Harbor Hot Springs and everything that can possibly go wrong does.
Her mother gets lost, the car breaks down. They're hungry, tired,
and completely without resources, and her mother just loses it,
(08:20):
completely loses it, and essentially has a nervous collapse right
there in the car in front of her four year
old daughter, in what must have been a frightening combination
of terror and rage. There's this moment where you write,
at the height of her hopelessness and noise, that felt
a calm presence near us, even though I knew we
(08:40):
were alone in the water. We held the car jerking,
some benevolent presence that cared for us but could not interfere.
Maybe sitting in the back seat, can you say more
about that benevolent presence and whether that's something that kind
of accompanied you at other times. You were very young
when you had that thought, right, I think it was
for And I talked to my mother about that later
(09:02):
after I had written it. I was mentioning this moment
you talked about in the car driving back from this
little sort of break we took, driving back to our home.
Oh my god, you know, we don't have money, we
don't have to support There's a sense of shame in
society for her role, and she feels as very acute way.
(09:22):
She is a married woman with an illegitimate child, and
she's thought that she would ever have thought of me
in that way. But Reagan is talking about, well, her
mother is and single mothers, and my father is saying
that she essentially slept with lots of people, and she
she hadn't and then it wasn't his kid, and you know,
it's just shame upon Shane. And she had had her
(09:45):
own test things in her childhood. And so she she's
screaming kind of at the universe, but I'm there. And
she said later when I asked her about it, that
she she's had other moments like that before that on,
but that at that moment she realized, oh, and he's
just going to remember this later. You know, there was
(10:05):
I was past the veil where memories disappear, and oh god,
I remember being terrified, and I remember if I didn't
keep a hold of myself, I might not realize how
weird certain things were. And I wanted certain things to
be weird because I didn't want them to be my life.
And that's another kind of disassociatures other presence in the car,
(10:28):
I guess the psychological model has named this phenomenon, which
is in a moment of extreme stress, the t sect
and becomes too our calmness finds another ground or something
like that is dissociation as defense. Right. I felt when
I was writing the book, like, oh my god, that's
(10:50):
the purpose of this book. In a certain way. I
get to go back and keep myself company. I get
to go back as a steady hand as someone is
to some degree made it out fine to all the
difficult times of my childhood when I didn't know if
we would make it out fine. And I can't influence anything,
(11:10):
but I get it's gonna sit in the backseat and
be this presence. Describe your mother to me. My mother
is humanist. I think if she's not creative, if she's
not expressing herself artistically, even in one day, she feels
disconnected from herself and becomes depressed. She decided when I
(11:32):
was born that she was going to become she was
going to be a mother and an artist, that she
was going to do them both, and she's pursued that
fairly intensely. She is very beautiful. I think she's really blunt.
She's really honest. She will tell the truth without thinking
(11:53):
of the consequences, because the truth is the only important
thing to her. Was that also true for you, you
were a child. There was a kind of like she
wasn't going to soften it so much for a child.
She was gonna And I don't mean it's in a
kind of crying in the car way, like that was
an art extraordinary circumstance. But I mean she would get
(12:14):
mary mad at me. For example, if I talked about
good guys and bad guys, which I see now children
doing all the time. It must have always been interposed childhood.
But if I would talk about good guys, she'd get furious.
This was useful to Lisa later, this talk of good
guys and bad guys. Her mom also talked about not
looking at things in black and white, but there were
many shades, many colors, also useful later. She was young.
(12:39):
She was so young. She was younger than everyone else's mother.
She was more beautiful, she was more fun, I think
in certain ways. But we would go and get coffee,
we would take walks and would go to hike. And
how old was she when she had you? She was
twenty three. She has a quality where she will sometimes
bite the hand that sees her. This feels like part
(13:01):
of this honesty, but I'm not sure if it always is,
and that quality was frustrating to me when I was
a kid. I would have rather lied to make things
comfortable for us, and that was not the way she operated.
Tell me your first memory of hearing about your father.
(13:25):
So at some point, I guess we came back from
Tahoe when I was four, and apparently he picked us
up in this porsche. I sat on my mother's lap,
those were the days, right in the frost seats, and
we drove to his He just bought this mansion and
wood side, and he bought it for the land and
had these big, old, beautiful, huge oak trees, and he
(13:49):
said the house was shipped and they had an elevator,
and I discovered it, or I felt I discovered it
and had an organ room start of going up and
down the elevator and I'm playing the organ. I mean,
organs is a church organ, so there's like rooms full
of pipes. At some point you gave me an apricot
from the orchard, and it was just like the best
thing I've ever had. And then I think we didn't
really start to get to know each other again. When
(14:11):
I was seven or eight, and I remember going back
to that mansion with him alone where I knew there
was an elevator and there was a church organ and
I knew that he didn't love that. I was fascinated
bordering on a set with those things. There was a
lot of silence. I think in retrospect he was very awkward,
(14:33):
and I think extraordinary and sort of groups and then
sometimes maybe much quieter one on one. Also, he was
getting to know his daughter for the first time, which
I can only imagine for somebody who maybe he wasn't
even particularly good with kids, who maybe felt ashamed he
hadn't been there earlier. And also we don't realize that
(14:54):
kids that kids can be a little scary when you're
an adult, when you don't know how to talk with
them and they don't respond the way adults do to reything.
Someone told me that the charms that worked on everyone
else didn't necessarily worked on me. And so then what
did he have. I've never seen someone dressed so well.
I remember that, and I wouldn't have been able to
put it in those words as a kid. And it
(15:14):
wasn't like he wore anything particularly fancy, but at that
point he was, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars,
so his sweaters. They weren't particularly fancy or anything, but
they were like a league different than anything I'd seen.
Is like he'd be wearing ripped up jeans. But then
there'd be something about his shoes. You know, with our clothes,
we wear them a bunch, washed a bunch, and they'd
get worn, the colors would fade, and maybe they'd be
(15:37):
a little tattered, and they they'd be a little wrinkly
from folding. And I think probably with his they were
in the drawer and maybe worn only a few times,
and they were crisp. But I remember that some puzzlement
about the way that he looked in the smells, the
smells of new clothes, and then finding it comforting because
it was almost like he was an emissary from another world,
(16:00):
a world that smells different. Maybe that smells European, right,
These clothes were probably perfumed, the package spent over. He
drove fast, not particularly well. The fat his car was rumbly.
All of the machines around him Nate noises that I
that were new to me. Again, they were probably your apacist.
(16:22):
There was a feeling of of magic when he was
around who they was special. He would come by oh,
your guy's coming by, you know, um, maybe we would
go for a skate. And he sort of walked in
this way where he seemed to fall forward and then
bounce up and fall forward. And I remember that, and
his hair was so dark, and even now just describing it,
(16:44):
just this feeling of love welling up at me right now,
even just like, oh, this one, this is the one
that I got, and how wonderful he is because he
was had a certain sweetness to him, and I I
want to say charmed, but I don't think that doesn't
justice because it went all the way to the core.
(17:06):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Lisa inhabits a world of contrasts that she feels into
its rather than comprehends. This is the way it is
in childhood, even in our teenage years. We don't yet
(17:29):
have the tools will develop later to be able to
think through, analyze, understand, so we're left with what we
sense and feel in our bodies. And what Lisa felt
was the difference between the way her mother and her
father moved through the world. Her mother's life was pinched
and closed, anxious, pressed, defined by limitation, and her father,
(17:53):
though He didn't live or act like a typical rich person.
He wore jeans and T shirts, lived in a crumbling mansion.
He moved through the world with a sense of possibility
and openness. How old were you when he suggested that
you come live with him? My moment, I was having
horrible fights. I think that she kind of had a crisis.
(18:17):
I mean understandably, I think in the sense that she
had been raising me alone with for a large part,
very very limited support, and then I started kind of
taking off in a certain way. I was in a
great school, I was doing really well. All I wanted
to do was study, and she was kind of the
(18:38):
the support staff she was made and this probably cast
her back to having always been the maid. And her
life was spluttering. She was breaking up with her boyfriend
of many years, and I think just everything was really
hard for her at that moment, and so we were
getting into horrible fights. And also I was like a
(18:59):
kind of, you know, a little bit shitty in the
sense that I didn't want to do the dishes. I
wanted to do my homework and I have, of course,
it's fair to help your parents with the dishes. I
think it was also like she would kind of naked,
as miserable as it could be, because she was in rage.
And that's why I didn't want to do the dishes
with her, like I didn't want to participate in this,
in this anymore. And she was getting worse, and I
(19:21):
felt I was getting better. And then also to my father,
who had turned his back on me when I was
little and then had increasingly become a part of my life,
I was now someone he could be proud of. Right,
I was doing really well in school, I was. I
know that soundsinical. I think in some ways it was
like I've gotten all shined up to the point where
(19:42):
he'd own me. I don't know that's terrible, but he
probably didn't necessarily want to take me any Just about
to have a baby, he has a new, very new wife.
Um he says he's moved to Palaso a few blocks away.
Later I asked him why, and he said, to be
close to me. He offered to have me move with him.
But it wasn't an offer that was necessarily full of joy.
(20:04):
It was almost a full of necessity. Was it? His
rules though, that that you not see your mother for
six months if you moved in with him, or where
did that come from. Was it protective of you because
things were so rough with your mother, or was it
controlling or or something else. He's just someone who doesn't
know what he's necessarily doing in the emotional sphere. Is
(20:24):
trying to help me in some ways to try and
stay from what has become a terrible environment with my mother,
and doesn't know how to love very easily when he
doesn't have any control. And I think, if I move
over to his house two blocks away from my mother,
and then I'm just still going over to my mother's
house all this time, and perhaps she's yelling at me,
(20:46):
who knows what he's thinking. I mean, if I put
it terribly towards him, if I'm seeing my mother all
the time, he has no way of making sure I'm okay.
And so that's that's what he invented, and then the
rules around that. I think we're six months. I remember
that kind of vaguely. It was a horrible crime, as
you could imagine. I remember a certain relief, like a
few I get to not see my mother, but I'm
(21:08):
not at fault for it, you know, So, so in
the beginning it was just relief, like I get to
move away, and it's my father's fault that I don't
have to see my mother, you know, because I'm so
angry with her, I'm so tired and spice and so
I'm this sort of moratorium on contact is a relief
for me. I mean, there would have been a million
(21:28):
ways to do it better, like we we all probably
should have gone to see a therapist. But I don't
think my father really believed in seeing a therapist, because
you know, obviously people who don't believe in therapists usually
there's something lurking under their right. But yeah, that was
a real thoughts job. I think telling me that they
can't see their mother for takes months. We needed some
(21:48):
real help, not some superficial kind of band aid regulated
controlling help. We needed real help. And I think he
was part of the problem of why we had ended
up there, why my mother was in such trouble, and
he took on some of solving that problem. He was
(22:10):
paying for my school, he was paying for my therapist,
going to a great school. I had a great therapist,
But he didn't really take it off and I both
understand it and I was sad about it. Yeah, yeah,
that makes a lot of sense. There's a part of
what you write about once you're there, you know, once
(22:30):
you're living in that home with he and his new wife,
and then your baby brother is born, and you describe
really powerfully sort of the anxiety that sets in. And
one of those ways is your hands, and that you
keep on like breaking glasses like you literally can't get
a grip. I think it's like some mix of adolescence
(22:53):
and destabilization. I just couldn't. I seem to want to
be pleasing. I was. I was such a sleezer and
will just leaser. Wanted to sit in and wanted to
be loved, wanted to be necessary, needed, enjoyed. And yet
I keep on breaking glasses all over the kitchen floor,
like every day, every day at dinner, and I sit
(23:14):
down at dinner, can get pay LESA not a glasses.
I'm not a glasses. Time don't And I'm so careful
and I'm so careful and I make it through me
and I almost said through the meal and then booth
something my elbows chest out when I'm reaching for my
last bite, whoever it is, and they're another book and
glass shutters on the floor, Oh Lasa, and I must
have felt it was such a difficulty, such a trial
(23:35):
and an annoyance to have this needy teenager in their
midst who's constantly breaking glasses on the on the floor
where their child is stepping. It's like every night just
promising myself I wasn't going to do the worst thing,
and then just despite all of my efforts, And this
is after I had been so beloved in my schools,
(23:58):
and and I've just switched WOLS and I don't know anybody,
but I so beloved in my school that I've always
had friends, and suddenly I can't make friends, and I
can't I can't seem to be beloved and needed, and
I keep on pushing myself away from the very thing
I think I want, which is somehow to just be included,
to be necessary, to be family. So it isn't a
(24:23):
particularly good time in the Job's family. There's a new baby,
an unhappy, awkward, accident prone teenager, the marriage is new
and tense, and Lisa's father's new company isn't going well.
Lisa's new stepmother is constitutionally not a warm person, even
under the best of circumstances, which these are not. Lisa's
(24:45):
feeling the tension in the home and absorbing it in
a way, becoming the physical embodiment of it. She's sort
of the black sheep the lightning rod. There's something going
on with everybody, but it keeps getting expressed through her.
So they go see a therapist, Lisa, her stepmother and
her father, and in response to Lisa's loneliness and pain,
(25:08):
her stepmother says, we're just cold people with honest like girlfriends.
You're barking up the wrong tree. We cannot give you
this thing you watched. He was gonna have to find
it other ways. Not that she said it that way.
Even maybe that's okay. We are all not omni capacity people,
(25:28):
and maybe the worst thing in life is to lie
about it. Maybe we have to be straightforward about our limitations.
So at the same time as I find it a
shocking admission and a shocking sense to say to someone
in high school or something, I also find it refreshing
and interesting and honest. And my father, actually, even or
(25:51):
wasn't a cold person, kind of added up to that
in a certain way because you couldn't depend on the warmth.
It was so intermittent and unpredictable. He was passionate, even warm,
and he was cold when he was enraged, you know,
the kind of cold rage like like he when he
was more really enraged in her. He'd completely ignored me,
but he wasn't cold. Something I found interesting and heartbreaking
(26:16):
in Lisa's story, and so illuminating of her internal condition,
is that she pilfered things, small, inconsequential things from her
father's home years later, when he was dying and she'd
come to visit. She'd take tiny things of no material value,
as if these things were going to bring her father
close and complete her life. She'd take them on the
(26:38):
plane home, a chipped bowl, an old pillow case, a
tube of lip gloss, as if these things would fill
up all the holes and cracks of whatever was missing.
She had done a version of this while in high
school as well. This time, after she discovers an envelope
full of hundred dollar bills, she peels one off, then
later another and another. She buys her sat the coat,
(27:01):
she buys gifts for her family. It isn't about the money,
It's about the feelings she can't touch or express. The
hubbit all are bills. I think that was a way
to access my own remorse somehow because that was the
result of it. Is I walked around feeling it was
(27:21):
almost like after I broke a glass. It was I
walked around feeling ashamed and full of remorse. And I
wonder if I hadn't felt somehow stolen from or ripped
off by my father in some deep way and twisted
it against myself, and if I wasn't trying to access
(27:43):
those feelings of being so bad that I was worth leaving,
of being so such a awful human being that I
would have merited being abandoned. Because my feeling, I mean,
you know, it's like this is a person who's been
into its therapy, but I'm just thinking, what is the
(28:05):
results of stealing those hundreds? The result was I walked
around always feeling every time I thought it would at
least I would think, he's got the it's over. I'm
gonna be out, he's gonna be He's going to know
how bad I am. I'm going to be left. And
so I wonder if in a certain way it found
me to him, it bound me to our story, which
did not yet feel resolved that he had left me.
(28:28):
And why I had no answer was it because I
was an ugly baby? Was it because I wasn't lovable?
Was it because there was something horribly wrong with my mother?
Who I am related to? All of these reasons I
could come up with because I didn't know the reason
and it hadn't been resolved, and I'm living with him,
but it's still not resolved, So I think that's what
(28:51):
it was about. But I think it was about keeping
myself feeling bad me because I still at my core,
had not reached any resolution about our history together through
these years. Lisa excels academically. This a great college is
going to be her ticket out and maybe also the shiny,
(29:14):
sparkling achievement that will solve all these unsolvable problems. She
has a dream of going to Harvard, a school which
is not out of reach for her, no matter who
her father is, And during her interview there some survival
instinct kicks in and she lets the interviewer know that
her father is the head of a little company called Apple.
(29:35):
The tenor of the interview changes. The interviewer excuses herself
for a moment, probably to go down the hall to
the development office, and when she returns, the level of
interest has risen just a bit. I really thought I
was going to go to my grave with that story,
because if you read that, you'll know I'm probably not
(29:56):
you know, maybe I'm not smart enough. I I you'll
know how much I was willing to kind of elbow
my way into something to get something. You know, you'll know,
opportunistic and selfish and sniveling whatever, you'll know all that
to me, and I got like, oh god, I don't
want people to read that. So it's funny, right I
(30:16):
wrote it, and you know, it wasn't so bad. People said, oh,
good scene, and I thought, oh, when I got the
stories in there that needed to be in there, somehow
the shame floated off of the stories for me so
that I didn't really worry about how I looked anymore
because I felt so much better. I love that. Thank
(30:37):
you for that, because that I, I mean, that's sort
of something that I talked about all the time and
think about it on the podcast, is the way that
actually voicing shame, whether you're writing a memoir about it
or speaking about it, it actually has this extraordinary effect
of ultimately having that shame float away. Right. It wasn't
until I started to open up the shameful thing that
(31:00):
I appeared. I became his body, So Shane was what
his body? So let me ask you one last question.
When your father is dying, he says to you again
and again and again, he says to you, I owe
you one, I owe you one. I'm just wondering what
you think he meant by that, and how you sort
(31:24):
of took that with you, that sense that he was
in some way at the end of all this he
was apologizing to you. It was like what I had
wanted the whole time. I think it meant like, at
least the way that I interpreted that was like you
and I see the same truth. What is missing for you?
(31:44):
I see, I know I did it. It is not nothing.
I had felt this feeling of being kind of ripped off,
meaning I didn't get to know my father when I
was younger, and he wasn't there for me. He wasn't
protecting me as well as he it. So I think
it was an acknowledgement of a common truth which was
been part of the problem. Gosh, it's amazing how powerful
(32:08):
it is to just say that your perspective of something
is similar to another person. I didn't need him to
make up for it. I didn't need him to apologize forever,
but just the idea of like I owe you and
I know it was so wonderful. It was such a bomb.
It felt like a bomb on a burn, like, oh,
(32:30):
if we see things the same way, then I'm not
crazy for all of my feelings. And I have felt
like some part of him would have been very proud
of me, but some part of him would have been
very pissed in me writing this book, and and somehow
took me some part of the narrative for me. I
wrote the book about myself, but he is pulled up
in that net. And so I have told myself, you
(32:51):
owe me one. This is the one can owe me things.
I get to write a book about myself and you
can consider some are all of your debt as alta.
(33:17):
I want to thank my guest Lisa Brennan Jobs for
sharing her story on our show. For more on Lisa's
memoir Small Fry, visit Lisa Brennan Jobs dot net. Family
Secrets is an I Heeart media production. Dylan Fagan is
the supervising producer. Julie Douglas and beth Ann Macaluso are
the executive producers. If you have a family secret you'd
(33:41):
like to share, get in touch with us at listener
mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com. You can also
find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder, Facebook at Family
Secrets Pod, and Twitter at Family Secrets Pod. For more
about my book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com. For
(34:12):
more podcasts. For my heart Radio, visit the I Heart
Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio. In
between visits, I saw my father all around New York.
I saw him sitting in a movie theater, the exact
curve of his neck to jaw to cheekbone. I saw
him as I ran along the Hudson River in winter,
(00:20):
sitting on a bench looking at the dock boats, and
on my subway, revived the work, walking away on the
platform through the crowd, thin men, olive skinned, fine fingered,
slim wristed, double bearded, who at certain angles looked just
like him. Each time I had to get closer to
check my heart in my throat, even though I knew
it could not possibly be him, because he was sick
(00:43):
in bed in California. Before this, during years in which
we hardly spoke, I had seen his picture everywhere. Seeing
the pictures gave me a strange thing. The feeling was
familiar to catching a glimpse of myself in a mirror
across the room and thinking it was someone else, and
then realizing it was my own faith Darry was peering
(01:03):
up for magazines and newspapers and screens in whatever city
I was in. That is my father, and no one
knows it, but it's true. That's Lisa Brennan Jobs, reading
from her first memoir, Small Fry. Lisa's story is both
about having a secret and being a secret. What's your
(01:23):
life like when your father, the father who initially did
not believe you were his, The father who only reluctantly
claimed you after he was forced to take a fraternity test,
The father who kept you at arm's length all your life,
is one of the most famous, powerful, and wealthiest men
in the world. Here's just a bit more from Lisa
(01:45):
before we dive into our conversation. I have a secret,
I said to my new friends at school. I whispered
it so they would see I was reluctant to mention it.
The key I felt was to underplay. My father is
Steve Jobs. Who is that? One asked, He's famous? I said,
he invented the personal computer. He lives in a mansion
(02:05):
and drives a Porsche convertible. He buys a new one
every time I gets a scratch. The story had a
film of unreality to it, as I said it, even
to my own ears. I hadn't hung out with him
that much, only a few skates and visits. I didn't
have the clothes or the bike. Someone with a father
like this would have. My last name was different from his.
(02:26):
He even named a computer after me. I said to them,
what computer. A girl named Elizabeth asked the Lisa. I said,
a computer called the Lisa. She said, I never heard
of it. It was ahead of its time. I used
my mother's phrase, although I wasn't sure why it was ahead.
He visited the personal computer later. But you can't tell
(02:48):
anyone because if someone finds out, I could get kidnapped.
I brought it up when I felt I needed to,
waiting as long as I could, and then letting it
burst forth. I don't remember feeling at a disadvantage with
my friends who had others, only that there was at
my fingertips another magical identity, an extra thing that started
to itch and tangle when I felt small, and it
(03:09):
was like a pressure building inside me. And then I
had to find a way to say it. She had
to find a way to say it. Isn't that what
this show is all about? So many of us are
trying to find a way to say it. Whatever it is,
this thing that wasn't allowed to be spoken. I'm Danny Shapiro,
(03:38):
and this is family secrets. The secrets that are kept
from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
secrets we keep from ourselves. So I missed it a lot. Actually,
the air in California and northern California knows of disks.
They're towering and there's silvery, and they have these size
(04:03):
in half moon knees that dangle down and shiver in
the wind. And they have these beautiful kind of button
shaped seeds that plunk on those ceilings and fall on
the roads, and they are kind of silvery too, and perfumed.
My mother was saying that they're not native to the
(04:24):
area and that their roots systems are really shallow, so
they can fall over. She said this when I was younger,
and I I held onto this idea, and I remember
when we would drive to the beach, which was up
this curvy road all the way over the hills and
then down to the Pacific Ocean. There was a line
of eucalyptus trees, and every time we would have to
(04:46):
go through that long tree lined road, I would hold
my breath with terror that these trees would fall down
on us. And then many years later said, oh, no, sweetheart,
no trees falling very slowly, but anyway, the air smelled
the people lift and danger. The earliest home I think
(05:06):
I remember was this place as the sort of the
batch house of the house in Memmo Park and no
are remember being in a shower with my mother and
she was the hot water and the cold water were
coming on. We were alternating them for some reason, and
she was yelling like closed poors, open pours, and I
was yelling it with her, and I think there was
a curtain, and then we would go outside. At that
(05:27):
house there was theater. The house was small that there
was quite the garden because the main house was surrounded
by land. This house is a kind of house on
spilt on a hill that was really falling apart a
little bit, the one with the trellis roses, and there
was ivy on one side where I would go and
play beside the big oak tree on my own. Or
(05:47):
was the boy who lived there with his mother also
we were renting a room. And now that house has
been all fixed up. It looks really nice because that
doesn't look anymore like it's going to fall down the
hill or like the wood is old. It looks like
a shiny, polished version of its old self when we
lived in a bunch of houses. I think I've removed
(06:09):
searching times before I was seven, but by the time
I was seven. What was it like to move thirteen
times in the first seven years of your life? I
mean both what was it like then? And like, how
do you think about that now? It's hard to know
what it was like then. I remember my mother being
very sad. I think maybe she was probably depressed and
(06:29):
probably just completely overwhelmed with our money less circumstances, and
how she would kind of sit in one of these
rooms in the dark, and I would feel embarrassed because
in this one's house that we're moving into, it was
our own house. We were the ones who had our
name on the lease, and I remember the des fiction,
oh my god, we're moving into a place that's just ours.
(06:51):
And I also remember noticing that we really didn't have
any furniture. So I had these moments of feeling a
distance from my own circumstances and of irthing them, maybe
because I've been to other people's houses. We lived at
one place over the summer that was full of furniture.
We stub led it from somewhere too was away, and
they had a television, and I remember watching Jethany Street
(07:12):
and they had so much furniture that right now, the
way I imagine it was the kind of a hoarder's paradise,
but in fact it might have just been a very well,
normally furnished house. You know. It wasn't necessarily something I
was looking at anthropologically, because it was my life and
I was so young I didn't really know any different.
And yet there were ploys when I remember thinking, oh,
that's different than what might be normal. And I think
(07:36):
that children will take these moments that are mysterious and
sort of box them up for later. And I think
that because I think during the process of writing a
memoir it was it was an unboxing. In other words,
the stories that I would remember, we're the ones that
where things happened that does not make sense to me
at the time, and that is why I had wrapped
(07:56):
them up and saved them for all that time. One
of these boxed up moments happens in a car after
Lisa and her mom have taken a road trip to
Harbor Hot Springs and everything that can possibly go wrong does.
Her mother gets lost, the car breaks down. They're hungry, tired,
and completely without resources, and her mother just loses it,
(08:20):
completely loses it, and essentially has a nervous collapse right
there in the car in front of her four year
old daughter, in what must have been a frightening combination
of terror and rage. There's this moment where you write,
at the height of her hopelessness and noise, that felt
a calm presence near us, even though I knew we
(08:40):
were alone in the water. We held the car jerking,
some benevolent presence that cared for us but could not interfere.
Maybe sitting in the back seat, can you say more
about that benevolent presence and whether that's something that kind
of accompanied you at other times. You were very young
when you had that thought, right, I think it was
for And I talked to my mother about that later
(09:02):
after I had written it. I was mentioning this moment
you talked about in the car driving back from this
little sort of break we took, driving back to our home.
Oh my god, you know, we don't have money, we
don't have to support There's a sense of shame in
society for her role, and she feels as very acute way.
(09:22):
She is a married woman with an illegitimate child, and
she's thought that she would ever have thought of me
in that way. But Reagan is talking about, well, her
mother is and single mothers, and my father is saying
that she essentially slept with lots of people, and she
she hadn't and then it wasn't his kid, and you know,
it's just shame upon Shane. And she had had her
(09:45):
own test things in her childhood. And so she she's
screaming kind of at the universe, but I'm there. And
she said later when I asked her about it, that
she she's had other moments like that before that on,
but that at that moment she realized, oh, and he's
just going to remember this later. You know, there was
(10:05):
I was past the veil where memories disappear, and oh god,
I remember being terrified, and I remember if I didn't
keep a hold of myself, I might not realize how
weird certain things were. And I wanted certain things to
be weird because I didn't want them to be my life.
And that's another kind of disassociatures other presence in the car,
(10:28):
I guess the psychological model has named this phenomenon, which
is in a moment of extreme stress, the t sect
and becomes too our calmness finds another ground or something
like that is dissociation as defense. Right. I felt when
I was writing the book, like, oh my god, that's
(10:50):
the purpose of this book. In a certain way. I
get to go back and keep myself company. I get
to go back as a steady hand as someone is
to some degree made it out fine to all the
difficult times of my childhood when I didn't know if
we would make it out fine. And I can't influence anything,
(11:10):
but I get it's gonna sit in the backseat and
be this presence. Describe your mother to me. My mother
is humanist. I think if she's not creative, if she's
not expressing herself artistically, even in one day, she feels
disconnected from herself and becomes depressed. She decided when I
(11:32):
was born that she was going to become she was
going to be a mother and an artist, that she
was going to do them both, and she's pursued that
fairly intensely. She is very beautiful. I think she's really blunt.
She's really honest. She will tell the truth without thinking
(11:53):
of the consequences, because the truth is the only important
thing to her. Was that also true for you, you
were a child. There was a kind of like she
wasn't going to soften it so much for a child.
She was gonna And I don't mean it's in a
kind of crying in the car way, like that was
an art extraordinary circumstance. But I mean she would get
(12:14):
mary mad at me. For example, if I talked about
good guys and bad guys, which I see now children
doing all the time. It must have always been interposed childhood.
But if I would talk about good guys, she'd get furious.
This was useful to Lisa later, this talk of good
guys and bad guys. Her mom also talked about not
looking at things in black and white, but there were
many shades, many colors, also useful later. She was young.
(12:39):
She was so young. She was younger than everyone else's mother.
She was more beautiful, she was more fun, I think
in certain ways. But we would go and get coffee,
we would take walks and would go to hike. And
how old was she when she had you? She was
twenty three. She has a quality where she will sometimes
bite the hand that sees her. This feels like part
(13:01):
of this honesty, but I'm not sure if it always is,
and that quality was frustrating to me when I was
a kid. I would have rather lied to make things
comfortable for us, and that was not the way she operated.
Tell me your first memory of hearing about your father.
(13:25):
So at some point, I guess we came back from
Tahoe when I was four, and apparently he picked us
up in this porsche. I sat on my mother's lap,
those were the days, right in the frost seats, and
we drove to his He just bought this mansion and
wood side, and he bought it for the land and
had these big, old, beautiful, huge oak trees, and he
(13:49):
said the house was shipped and they had an elevator,
and I discovered it, or I felt I discovered it
and had an organ room start of going up and
down the elevator and I'm playing the organ. I mean,
organs is a church organ, so there's like rooms full
of pipes. At some point you gave me an apricot
from the orchard, and it was just like the best
thing I've ever had. And then I think we didn't
really start to get to know each other again. When
(14:11):
I was seven or eight, and I remember going back
to that mansion with him alone where I knew there
was an elevator and there was a church organ and
I knew that he didn't love that. I was fascinated
bordering on a set with those things. There was a
lot of silence. I think in retrospect he was very awkward,
(14:33):
and I think extraordinary and sort of groups and then
sometimes maybe much quieter one on one. Also, he was
getting to know his daughter for the first time, which
I can only imagine for somebody who maybe he wasn't
even particularly good with kids, who maybe felt ashamed he
hadn't been there earlier. And also we don't realize that
(14:54):
kids that kids can be a little scary when you're
an adult, when you don't know how to talk with
them and they don't respond the way adults do to reything.
Someone told me that the charms that worked on everyone
else didn't necessarily worked on me. And so then what
did he have. I've never seen someone dressed so well.
I remember that, and I wouldn't have been able to
put it in those words as a kid. And it
(15:14):
wasn't like he wore anything particularly fancy, but at that
point he was, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars,
so his sweaters. They weren't particularly fancy or anything, but
they were like a league different than anything I'd seen.
Is like he'd be wearing ripped up jeans. But then
there'd be something about his shoes. You know, with our clothes,
we wear them a bunch, washed a bunch, and they'd
get worn, the colors would fade, and maybe they'd be
(15:37):
a little tattered, and they they'd be a little wrinkly
from folding. And I think probably with his they were
in the drawer and maybe worn only a few times,
and they were crisp. But I remember that some puzzlement
about the way that he looked in the smells, the
smells of new clothes, and then finding it comforting because
it was almost like he was an emissary from another world,
(16:00):
a world that smells different. Maybe that smells European, right,
These clothes were probably perfumed, the package spent over. He
drove fast, not particularly well. The fat his car was rumbly.
All of the machines around him Nate noises that I
that were new to me. Again, they were probably your apacist.
(16:22):
There was a feeling of of magic when he was
around who they was special. He would come by oh,
your guy's coming by, you know, um, maybe we would
go for a skate. And he sort of walked in
this way where he seemed to fall forward and then
bounce up and fall forward. And I remember that, and
his hair was so dark, and even now just describing it,
(16:44):
just this feeling of love welling up at me right now,
even just like, oh, this one, this is the one
that I got, and how wonderful he is because he
was had a certain sweetness to him, and I I
want to say charmed, but I don't think that doesn't
justice because it went all the way to the core.
(17:06):
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Lisa inhabits a world of contrasts that she feels into
its rather than comprehends. This is the way it is
in childhood, even in our teenage years. We don't yet
(17:29):
have the tools will develop later to be able to
think through, analyze, understand, so we're left with what we
sense and feel in our bodies. And what Lisa felt
was the difference between the way her mother and her
father moved through the world. Her mother's life was pinched
and closed, anxious, pressed, defined by limitation, and her father,
(17:53):
though He didn't live or act like a typical rich person.
He wore jeans and T shirts, lived in a crumbling mansion.
He moved through the world with a sense of possibility
and openness. How old were you when he suggested that
you come live with him? My moment, I was having
horrible fights. I think that she kind of had a crisis.
(18:17):
I mean understandably, I think in the sense that she
had been raising me alone with for a large part,
very very limited support, and then I started kind of
taking off in a certain way. I was in a
great school, I was doing really well. All I wanted
to do was study, and she was kind of the
(18:38):
the support staff she was made and this probably cast
her back to having always been the maid. And her
life was spluttering. She was breaking up with her boyfriend
of many years, and I think just everything was really
hard for her at that moment, and so we were
getting into horrible fights. And also I was like a
(18:59):
kind of, you know, a little bit shitty in the
sense that I didn't want to do the dishes. I
wanted to do my homework and I have, of course,
it's fair to help your parents with the dishes. I
think it was also like she would kind of naked,
as miserable as it could be, because she was in rage.
And that's why I didn't want to do the dishes
with her, like I didn't want to participate in this,
in this anymore. And she was getting worse, and I
(19:21):
felt I was getting better. And then also to my father,
who had turned his back on me when I was
little and then had increasingly become a part of my life,
I was now someone he could be proud of. Right,
I was doing really well in school, I was. I
know that soundsinical. I think in some ways it was
like I've gotten all shined up to the point where
(19:42):
he'd own me. I don't know that's terrible, but he
probably didn't necessarily want to take me any Just about
to have a baby, he has a new, very new wife.
Um he says he's moved to Palaso a few blocks away.
Later I asked him why, and he said, to be
close to me. He offered to have me move with him.
But it wasn't an offer that was necessarily full of joy.
(20:04):
It was almost a full of necessity. Was it? His
rules though, that that you not see your mother for
six months if you moved in with him, or where
did that come from. Was it protective of you because
things were so rough with your mother, or was it
controlling or or something else. He's just someone who doesn't
know what he's necessarily doing in the emotional sphere. Is
(20:24):
trying to help me in some ways to try and
stay from what has become a terrible environment with my mother,
and doesn't know how to love very easily when he
doesn't have any control. And I think, if I move
over to his house two blocks away from my mother,
and then I'm just still going over to my mother's
house all this time, and perhaps she's yelling at me,
(20:46):
who knows what he's thinking. I mean, if I put
it terribly towards him, if I'm seeing my mother all
the time, he has no way of making sure I'm okay.
And so that's that's what he invented, and then the
rules around that. I think we're six months. I remember
that kind of vaguely. It was a horrible crime, as
you could imagine. I remember a certain relief, like a
few I get to not see my mother, but I'm
(21:08):
not at fault for it, you know, So, so in
the beginning it was just relief, like I get to
move away, and it's my father's fault that I don't
have to see my mother, you know, because I'm so
angry with her, I'm so tired and spice and so
I'm this sort of moratorium on contact is a relief
for me. I mean, there would have been a million
(21:28):
ways to do it better, like we we all probably
should have gone to see a therapist. But I don't
think my father really believed in seeing a therapist, because
you know, obviously people who don't believe in therapists usually
there's something lurking under their right. But yeah, that was
a real thoughts job. I think telling me that they
can't see their mother for takes months. We needed some
(21:48):
real help, not some superficial kind of band aid regulated
controlling help. We needed real help. And I think he
was part of the problem of why we had ended
up there, why my mother was in such trouble, and
he took on some of solving that problem. He was
(22:10):
paying for my school, he was paying for my therapist,
going to a great school. I had a great therapist,
But he didn't really take it off and I both
understand it and I was sad about it. Yeah, yeah,
that makes a lot of sense. There's a part of
what you write about once you're there, you know, once
(22:30):
you're living in that home with he and his new wife,
and then your baby brother is born, and you describe
really powerfully sort of the anxiety that sets in. And
one of those ways is your hands, and that you
keep on like breaking glasses like you literally can't get
a grip. I think it's like some mix of adolescence
(22:53):
and destabilization. I just couldn't. I seem to want to
be pleasing. I was. I was such a sleezer and
will just leaser. Wanted to sit in and wanted to
be loved, wanted to be necessary, needed, enjoyed. And yet
I keep on breaking glasses all over the kitchen floor,
like every day, every day at dinner, and I sit
(23:14):
down at dinner, can get pay LESA not a glasses.
I'm not a glasses. Time don't And I'm so careful
and I'm so careful and I make it through me
and I almost said through the meal and then booth
something my elbows chest out when I'm reaching for my
last bite, whoever it is, and they're another book and
glass shutters on the floor, Oh Lasa, and I must
have felt it was such a difficulty, such a trial
(23:35):
and an annoyance to have this needy teenager in their
midst who's constantly breaking glasses on the on the floor
where their child is stepping. It's like every night just
promising myself I wasn't going to do the worst thing,
and then just despite all of my efforts, And this
is after I had been so beloved in my schools,
(23:58):
and and I've just switched WOLS and I don't know anybody,
but I so beloved in my school that I've always
had friends, and suddenly I can't make friends, and I
can't I can't seem to be beloved and needed, and
I keep on pushing myself away from the very thing
I think I want, which is somehow to just be included,
to be necessary, to be family. So it isn't a
(24:23):
particularly good time in the Job's family. There's a new baby,
an unhappy, awkward, accident prone teenager, the marriage is new
and tense, and Lisa's father's new company isn't going well.
Lisa's new stepmother is constitutionally not a warm person, even
under the best of circumstances, which these are not. Lisa's
(24:45):
feeling the tension in the home and absorbing it in
a way, becoming the physical embodiment of it. She's sort
of the black sheep the lightning rod. There's something going
on with everybody, but it keeps getting expressed through her.
So they go see a therapist, Lisa, her stepmother and
her father, and in response to Lisa's loneliness and pain,
(25:08):
her stepmother says, we're just cold people with honest like girlfriends.
You're barking up the wrong tree. We cannot give you
this thing you watched. He was gonna have to find
it other ways. Not that she said it that way.
Even maybe that's okay. We are all not omni capacity people,
(25:28):
and maybe the worst thing in life is to lie
about it. Maybe we have to be straightforward about our limitations.
So at the same time as I find it a
shocking admission and a shocking sense to say to someone
in high school or something, I also find it refreshing
and interesting and honest. And my father, actually, even or
(25:51):
wasn't a cold person, kind of added up to that
in a certain way because you couldn't depend on the warmth.
It was so intermittent and unpredictable. He was passionate, even warm,
and he was cold when he was enraged, you know,
the kind of cold rage like like he when he
was more really enraged in her. He'd completely ignored me,
but he wasn't cold. Something I found interesting and heartbreaking
(26:16):
in Lisa's story, and so illuminating of her internal condition,
is that she pilfered things, small, inconsequential things from her
father's home years later, when he was dying and she'd
come to visit. She'd take tiny things of no material value,
as if these things were going to bring her father
close and complete her life. She'd take them on the
(26:38):
plane home, a chipped bowl, an old pillow case, a
tube of lip gloss, as if these things would fill
up all the holes and cracks of whatever was missing.
She had done a version of this while in high
school as well. This time, after she discovers an envelope
full of hundred dollar bills, she peels one off, then
later another and another. She buys her sat the coat,
(27:01):
she buys gifts for her family. It isn't about the money,
It's about the feelings she can't touch or express. The
hubbit all are bills. I think that was a way
to access my own remorse somehow because that was the
result of it. Is I walked around feeling it was
(27:21):
almost like after I broke a glass. It was I
walked around feeling ashamed and full of remorse. And I
wonder if I hadn't felt somehow stolen from or ripped
off by my father in some deep way and twisted
it against myself, and if I wasn't trying to access
(27:43):
those feelings of being so bad that I was worth leaving,
of being so such a awful human being that I
would have merited being abandoned. Because my feeling, I mean,
you know, it's like this is a person who's been
into its therapy, but I'm just thinking, what is the
(28:05):
results of stealing those hundreds? The result was I walked
around always feeling every time I thought it would at
least I would think, he's got the it's over. I'm
gonna be out, he's gonna be He's going to know
how bad I am. I'm going to be left. And
so I wonder if in a certain way it found
me to him, it bound me to our story, which
did not yet feel resolved that he had left me.
(28:28):
And why I had no answer was it because I
was an ugly baby? Was it because I wasn't lovable?
Was it because there was something horribly wrong with my mother?
Who I am related to? All of these reasons I
could come up with because I didn't know the reason
and it hadn't been resolved, and I'm living with him,
but it's still not resolved, So I think that's what
(28:51):
it was about. But I think it was about keeping
myself feeling bad me because I still at my core,
had not reached any resolution about our history together through
these years. Lisa excels academically. This a great college is
going to be her ticket out and maybe also the shiny,
(29:14):
sparkling achievement that will solve all these unsolvable problems. She
has a dream of going to Harvard, a school which
is not out of reach for her, no matter who
her father is, And during her interview there some survival
instinct kicks in and she lets the interviewer know that
her father is the head of a little company called Apple.
(29:35):
The tenor of the interview changes. The interviewer excuses herself
for a moment, probably to go down the hall to
the development office, and when she returns, the level of
interest has risen just a bit. I really thought I
was going to go to my grave with that story,
because if you read that, you'll know I'm probably not
(29:56):
you know, maybe I'm not smart enough. I I you'll
know how much I was willing to kind of elbow
my way into something to get something. You know, you'll know,
opportunistic and selfish and sniveling whatever, you'll know all that
to me, and I got like, oh god, I don't
want people to read that. So it's funny, right I
(30:16):
wrote it, and you know, it wasn't so bad. People said, oh,
good scene, and I thought, oh, when I got the
stories in there that needed to be in there, somehow
the shame floated off of the stories for me so
that I didn't really worry about how I looked anymore
because I felt so much better. I love that. Thank
(30:37):
you for that, because that I, I mean, that's sort
of something that I talked about all the time and
think about it on the podcast, is the way that
actually voicing shame, whether you're writing a memoir about it
or speaking about it, it actually has this extraordinary effect
of ultimately having that shame float away. Right. It wasn't
until I started to open up the shameful thing that
(31:00):
I appeared. I became his body, So Shane was what
his body? So let me ask you one last question.
When your father is dying, he says to you again
and again and again, he says to you, I owe
you one, I owe you one. I'm just wondering what
you think he meant by that, and how you sort
(31:24):
of took that with you, that sense that he was
in some way at the end of all this he
was apologizing to you. It was like what I had
wanted the whole time. I think it meant like, at
least the way that I interpreted that was like you
and I see the same truth. What is missing for you?
(31:44):
I see, I know I did it. It is not nothing.
I had felt this feeling of being kind of ripped off,
meaning I didn't get to know my father when I
was younger, and he wasn't there for me. He wasn't
protecting me as well as he it. So I think
it was an acknowledgement of a common truth which was
been part of the problem. Gosh, it's amazing how powerful
(32:08):
it is to just say that your perspective of something
is similar to another person. I didn't need him to
make up for it. I didn't need him to apologize forever,
but just the idea of like I owe you and
I know it was so wonderful. It was such a bomb.
It felt like a bomb on a burn, like, oh,
(32:30):
if we see things the same way, then I'm not
crazy for all of my feelings. And I have felt
like some part of him would have been very proud
of me, but some part of him would have been
very pissed in me writing this book, and and somehow
took me some part of the narrative for me. I
wrote the book about myself, but he is pulled up
in that net. And so I have told myself, you
(32:51):
owe me one. This is the one can owe me things.
I get to write a book about myself and you
can consider some are all of your debt as alta.
(33:17):
I want to thank my guest Lisa Brennan Jobs for
sharing her story on our show. For more on Lisa's
memoir Small Fry, visit Lisa Brennan Jobs dot net. Family
Secrets is an I Heeart media production. Dylan Fagan is
the supervising producer. Julie Douglas and beth Ann Macaluso are
the executive producers. If you have a family secret you'd
(33:41):
like to share, get in touch with us at listener
mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com. You can also
find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder, Facebook at Family
Secrets Pod, and Twitter at Family Secrets Pod. For more
about my book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com. For
(34:12):
more podcasts. For my heart Radio, visit the I Heart
Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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