The New Yorker Radio Hour - Lisa Brennan-Jobs on the Shadow of Steve Jobs, and Jill Lepore on the Long Sweep of American History

Episode Date: September 21, 2018

Lisa Brennan-Jobs’s memoir, “Small Fry,” shares a common theme with many memoirs: the absent parent and the mark left by that absence in the adult writer. But the parent, in this case, is a figure who has also left his mark on the larger world. While Steve Jobs was becoming a titan of Silicon Valley and changed the future of computing, his daughter Lisa and her mother were living near the poverty line, struggling to get by. At first, Jobs avoided his responsibilities to them by denying his paternity. But even after he established a relationship with his daughter, his behavior was capricious and sometimes cruel. Yet Brennan-Jobs insists that she didn’t set out to write an exposé; rather, she wanted to tell a more universal story of a young woman finding her place in the world. “Small Fry,” in other words, is about Lisa, not Steve. “I knew I was writing a coming-of-age story about a girl,” she tells David Remnick, “but that it was going to be twisted into the story of a famous man.” Plus, the historian Jill Lepore on her new book that she says is the result of a dare: “These Truths,” a monumentally ambitious account of five-hundred-plus years of American history. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Lisa Brennan Jobs has written a book called Smallfry, and in many ways it's a memoir with a pretty familiar theme, the absent parent. In her case, about a father who for years rejected and even denied their relationship and his duties. When Brennan Jobs was a child, she and her mother, a very young mother, lived near the poverty line. Even as that father, Steve Jobs, was becoming a king of Silicon Valley. Lisa Brennan Jobs has avoided cooperating with writers portraying Steve Jobs, biographers, profile writers. She wanted to tell her own story, with all its pain, and after many years, a reconciliation.

She's published her memoir to largely excellent reviews, but she told me there's still the link feeling that she wish her first book had been about something, anything else, so that it could be completely her story and not the story of the man whose legacy were all carrying around in our pockets. I asked her to read from the book's introduction. Three months before he died, I began to steal things from my father's house. I wandered around barefoot and slipped objects into my pockets. I took blush, toothpaste, two chipped finger bowls in celadon blue, a bottle of nail polish,

a pair of worn patent leather ballet slippers and four faded white pillowcases, the color of old teeth. After stealing each item, I felt sated. I promised myself that this would be the last time. But soon, the urge to take something else would arrive again, like thirst. Now, you begin this book in the way that you do. Why? I guess it makes me an active participant in the book. One thing that happened when I started writing is I was disappearing in the pages. I was writing about my parents

and different things that had happened and I couldn't... Other people who read it said, I can't quite locate you. And I think there was a feeling of, like, am I actually... Am I allowed to write my own story when I have such a famous father?

What are the implications of that? What does that mean? I knew it was going to be taken in a direction I knew I was writing the coming of age story about a girl, but that it was going to be twisted into the story of a famous man. I wanted to write a coming of age story about a girl growing up in California in the 80s and 90s because I felt like it was a universal story.

So we were moving a lot and looking for homes. You moved an incredible number of times. Yeah, it was 13 times before I was seven. Right. And there was also, even in the homes I was in, a search for a feeling of belonging and being inside and being impossible to push out. Yes, one of the homes was a mansion. Yes.

He's so famous. But it doesn't change the fact that I was searching for a home. And I was hoping, I was hoping that. I would have inspiration to write another book first. So that perhaps that would dull or numb the fact that I have someone so famous in this family I'm writing about. And why didn't you write a first book about something else? Because this one kept on coming up.

And I think a lot of novelists and... Coming up meaning what? Coming up to be expressed. There were stories that kept on, oh gosh, I got... You had to do it. I had to... And I think this is common... I think this is common even with novelists

where there's a story maybe that has to come out first that then opens the way for other stories. And I felt like that. And also I was hoping, then the second thing I was hoping is I was hoping that my father would be like incredibly dull on the page. I'm afraid that didn't happen. And then it didn't happen. No, it didn't happen.

He was interesting. And I was like, oh gosh, he's going to steal my thunder. No. Steve Jobs is the father, often the missing father, the father that rejects you for a long time. Much later, it invites you in. There are moments of real cruelty, some of it mindless, some of it you ascribe to immaturity on his part. But it's tough.

It's really tough. And what was that like to re-experience every day over your desk? So this is what I was thinking. You have this thing with memoir where you're going back and you're writing about it again and you're pulled back into these feelings and these times. But at the end of the same, you're going back. the day I got to put down the pen and then go back to my life. I mean, it's like the fantasy of control, right? Mastery of the past.

Right. So I got to go back and live in the past and elongate the good moments and maybe even elongate the bad moments to really figure out what they meant to me and suffer through them, but I still had control over them ultimately. And I had perspective control. I could see them from the point of view of an adult and a child. I guess that was the purpose of it. For a long, long period of time, you certainly had no relationship to your father, no acknowledgement

from a father. To what degree was he spoken of at home with your mother? So, how? There were so many discoveries that I made when I was writing the book, right? One of the discoveries was how my mother had left this space open for him to come back. She'd known him since they were both very young and she knew who he was. And so there was a, you don't forget that. You don't forget when you know someone who they are.

And so she wasn't doing it in some sort of strategic way. Oh, you know, I don't want to turn Lisa against her father. She just genuinely did not want to turn me against my father because she knew that deep down he cared about me. He was not exactly generous in the early years in terms of providing for you. No, he was absent in the early years. Mostly my relationship was with my mother.

and that was so intense. You know, it was so close the way often only children and their parents are and then made closer by the fact that we didn't have money so we were like bound together, you know? Us against the world.

Yeah, it was a bit us against the world and I think, and then, I mean, now I have a child and I just think of how, you know, she had to walk to the laundromat to wash the cloth diapers when they were dirty, you know, one set. It's like, oh my gosh. And worse.

And far worse. But how do you make sense of why couldn't you have helped more? I mean, people get split up, they get divorced, but very often they do for each other what they can. Oh, I don't think it was a money question. You know, it was emotional. I think he wasn't ready to be a father. My parents were both very young when I was born.

How old? And 23. And I was not planned for her. and perhaps he was angry about my arrival, so he wasn't around. And I feel there's some credit due that he came back. You know, I think that was hard. What got him back? I don't know.

But my mother said something like when his work life was not doing as well, you know, because at that point he'd been kicked out of Apple, and I think that left an opening for him to look around and notice that we were around. And then he puts some effort into getting to know me. Really true effort. And I think it was probably a pretty courageous thing because I don't think he really knew how to be around a kid.

So the Steve Jobs that comes out of popular imagination, you get the sense of a visionary, a certain kind of genius, a really difficult, difficult guy, at times cruel, self-centered, moments of kindness, I guess, but they're eclipsed, the other stuff most often. He's gone. This book is accomplished. How do you see him?

I have so many answers to that. The way that you just read he came off was from the other things that you read, not from my book. Absolutely. So I'm curious how mine is different from those for you. Because it's a book about you.

Right. I thought so, too. A book about you. Yeah. And how does he come off differently? Well, there are moments where I want to hit him. More than before. Well, because it's coming from a kid who's palpable on the page.

Right, right. So it's like it's not necessarily a different character that I'm describing. It's just that it's visceral now. I think that's fair. I've tried to understand why this reaction has been strong because I feel like he's been so well-covered. It was like, and that there are moments of joy, tenderness, sweetness, care in this book between the two of us that are nowhere else, right? Well, maybe it's because people feel a certain sense of, it's very strange to me in a certain

way, relationship and ownership to this guy who's now been dead for a while. Yeah. Because he's in their pockets. Right. He's on their desks. Right. It's a very odd thing. People feel they have ownership.

And here you come into the world, the daughter who has been. treated badly or rejected and forgotten in the early years. And then this very complicated reconciliation and relationship develops. And there's even on his deathbed. Maybe you should tell us about what happened when he was very sick. Yeah. So we kind of had a Hollywood moment. I went back to see him before he died and he was apologizing fiercely for a weekend and crying.

And it was, and saying, I owe you one, I owe you one, which seemed like such an odd phrase. What is I owe you and me? I don't know. I didn't know how to make sense of it, really. I said to him, if we could do it again, then maybe next time we could be friends. Because we liked each other. We would laugh together. It was fun when we were friends.

But also, I meant not your daughter, please, next time. That was hard. Yeah. And he was saying the same thing. God, it was hard. It was so hard. It wasn't too little too late? Well, it may have been.

And it was, I don't want to sound, it's hard to say it was too little too late because it's been so glorious that it happened, right? But yeah, it was cathartic, but it was also hard to be in the moment at the time. I remember thinking, okay, I guess I'll need to say this for later. Like many of these memories, you kind of are confused and you box them up. So, but I think the process of writing the book was that unboxing. Maybe the last question, and it's about this, it's about inheritance. What do you have of your mothers and what of your fathers and in what ways? Oh, God, I was so worried you were going to ask me about money.

No, I mean, I mean it in a much different sense. What do I have of my? It's like, was there too little of him to derive enough of him? the book is about this in some sense, not getting enough of someone. And I think, I think sometimes the famous guy is a little distracting, just because... The famous guy in the corner over there. The famous guy in the corner over there wearing the black mock turtle neck. Because don't other people feel this way about the complicated figures in their own lives?

Like, isn't there sometimes a longing for people who are even around? Isn't there sometimes a multiplicity of feelings for people who you love? I imagine other people have similar feelings, even though my father was so famous. Or maybe another way to put it is that everyone's complex family is unique. No matter who it is. No matter who it is. Lisa Brennan Jobs. Her new memoir is called Small Fry.

ahead this hour I'll talk with Jill Lippor about American history. Her new book takes in absolutely all of it, and we're going to talk about some of the important bits. You're listening to The New Yorker Radio Hour. For one extraordinary weekend, the New Yorker assembles more than 50 events featuring some of today's most prominent writers, artists, filmmakers, actors, comedians, musicians, politicians,

and activists. Don't miss it. October 5th through 7th, Explore the full festival lineup and buy tickets now at New Yorker.com slash festival. That's new yorker.com slash festival. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In our political climate, arguments about the past are absolutely everywhere. Look at the turmoil over Confederate monuments or on the limits to immigration. Think about the president's call that we should make America great again

versus the progressive view that we are always somehow trying to make. make America better. Jill Lepore has been writing for the New Yorker about our current political struggles, but always with the long view of a historian. An inner-day job, when she's not writing pieces for us, Jill's a professor of history at Harvard University. And in a brand new book called These Truths, she's tackled the entire American story. And it's a remarkable undertaking.

Jill, let me start with the obvious. You've decided to do a survey of over 600 years of American history. From 1492 to last week. The obvious but the inexplicable. Well, that's it. That's it. What possessed you? Why did you tackle something so ultimately expansive?

Partly, I really can't turn down a dare. This is a bad thing to confess. A. B. What was a dare? Who dared you? Norton, the publisher. Then I really, really, really thought,

damn, I wish there was a book like that. and I decided someone should try. Well, this book, which is filled with all kinds of triumphs and achievements and all the rest, but it opens with some really grim statistics. And you write between 1,500 and 1,500, roughly 2.5 million Europeans moved to the Americas, and they carried 12 million Africans there by force, and as many as 50 million Native Americans died, chiefly of disease. And so I suppose it illustrates one of the unfortunate realities of history, which is that

most of the people affected by major events didn't have much of a choice in them. How has powerlessness informed the study of America and the story of America? What I argue, and this is actually something I came to believe on, again, like kind of freshly reading the evidence, was that it is actually the assassination of worlds. It is that slaughter, those atrocities, that enslavement, that profound loss and suffering, that is a crucible of violence that makes possible the idea. ideas on which this nation is founded. As horrible as that is, the beauty of the idea that all humans are equal, that we are born in alienity with natural rights, that the people are sovereign,

and they give their consent to be governed. These ideas are actually made possible by the protests made by the powerless during that in the numbers that you cite there. So I give a lot of causal weight to slave insurrection, runaways, enslaved people who run away, wives and servants who flee, to apprentices who run away, to native peoples who wage wars or in other ways resist the taking of their lands, that it is that sort of the ceaseless question in the ferment of that violent, that world of violence, where people just keep saying again and again and again, by what right have you taken my labor and my life and my freedom? And it's that conversation. That sparks all this political thought that makes possible, say, American independence. And that doesn't

make American independence less magnificent in terms of the power of those political ideas. Their origins are darker and more complicated. But then I think one reason that's useful to think about is then we all have ancestors in that story. A lot of what the book is about is about who counts, who counts as an American. And when you look at the contemporary headlines, say, about immigration, whether it's detention centers for kids or mass deportations or what's colloquially called a Muslim travel ban, how does that all fit into the American story that you're telling? I think immigration restrictionists cannot find a lot of support for their position in the record of the American past. They have their political forebears do not come out well in any fair assessment of the seeking of freedom and justice and equality in a democratic society in the American past. And I come out differently on that question that I do say about fundamentally. with which I gained a lot of sympathy here,

not being a fundamentalist myself. The immigration restrictionists have a very uncomfortable legacy to wrestle with. Importantly, there are no federal laws restricting immigration until the 1880s. I mean, fully a century after the founding of the country,

you can just come into the country. Like open borders are the most scandalous thing in American industry? No, they're not. They're actually the founding ideal. Jill, one of the figures you write about is a woman named Mary Elise, a woman I'd never heard about before. And you say that she helped bring the moral crusade into American politics. Who was she and how did she do that?

Yeah, she's pretty fascinating person. So she was a Kansas farmer. She was a farmer's wife. She had, I don't know, six kids. I think most of them died. She, there was like sod farmers in Kansas. Lost everything in the Depression of 1873 as so many Americans did. Gave herself basically a college education about reading stuff

that she pasted to the wall, that she could read while she was doing chores. She eventually, you know, she studied the law. She ran for office. She eventually became a journalist and worked for Joseph Poulter. But she was probably the most famous speaker on the populist speaker circuit. Before William Jennings Bryan, the great populist demagogue of the late 19th and early 20th century. She, like many poor farmers in places like Kansas and Nebraska, looked at the economic development in the second half of that after the Civil War and said,

this is just a conspiracy of the government and railroad companies. They've declared corporations to be people, and they're giving corporations all these benefits, and poor farmers can't make a living. And the people have lost all their political power. And one of the ways she thought that could be remedied was by getting women the right to vote. And we tend not to pay much attention to how much populism was aligned with a certain strain of suffrage in the 19th century. She was very tall, so people always describe her as an Amazon, and I love her because she said, she said, man is man, but woman is superwoman. She had this great 19th century idea about women's superiority. Like, she's just very, very interesting and she's compelling. She was anti-Semitic.

She ended up writing this kind of crazy, insane manifesto about white supremacy at the end of her life. Like, she's a much discredited character for many, many reasons, but you can't just, like, scratch her off. So she comes out of that crusade that abolitionism is a female crusade, temperance is a female crusade, woman suffrage is a female crusade, populism becomes a female crusade. And then it turns into prohibitionism. What happens after women get the right to vote, they don't need to crusade anymore. But by now, the crusade, the moral crusade is just a great big, big giant wrench in the American political campaign toolbox. And so other people like, oh, I'll use that. So Joe McCarthy wages a moral crusade. Barry Goldwater wages a moral crusade.

Ronald Reagan's campaign was a moral crusade. It becomes the kind of go-to tool of conservatism. Is Donald Trump a moral crusade? No. No. I wouldn't think so. No, no. But he uses the language of a moral crusade.

And he, I mean, that's one of the many perplexing things about that campaign. But he is anointed by people who are, associate with the moral crusade. You know, Phyllis Schlafly, like her last political act, the very, very end of her life in 2016, is to endorse Donald Trump. That's actually... Phyllis Schlafly, the great anti-feminist. The great anti-feminist who stopped the ERA. Yeah. She, you know, supports McCarthy. She supports Goldwater. She's right out of the Mary Lease playbook. One of the things that took me by surprise, although I know you've been obsessed with it in pieces, including for the New Yorker, is the presence of the media in this book.

what is it about early America that made a free press so important and it's enshrined in the First Amendment and it's right up there with the freedom of religion? What did that press in early America look like and how is it radically different from anywhere else in Europe, for example? Yeah, so this is, you know, to the extent that I have a specialty as a scholar, it really is the history of how we communicate politically. The idea of the freedom of speech and freedom of press has like a separate. 17th and 18th century, early 18th century history that really influences our Bill of Rights. But there is also a very particular cast on those ideas that the founders of the Republic make note of.

They don't really see, have no idea where it's going, but they do understand that if people are going to be able to vote for their representatives who will make the laws, that the people need to have enough information to cast informed ballots. and for the people to have enough information to cast informed ballots in this country that is actually quite big. And by 18th century standards, just vast, huge, sprawling, monstrous, they need to have some way to receive ideas other than just the educated gentleman writing letters to one another. What was the relationship between leaders in the press early on? Is there any precedent to a president calling us, us meeting the press, in public, the enemy of the people?

Was there that kind of attack or vituperation? You know, we know what things Andrew Jackson said privately, but the presidents all got pissed off at the press. This is the famous thing of Jefferson saying, this is maybe 1804, you know, every newspaper should be divided into four sections. Truths lies, improbabilities and impossibilities. You know, like, it's not that he thought that the press was to be believed all the time, but he knew that it was essential, that there, this is what he says, you know, in his first inaugural address, that the, we are all federals, we're all Republicans. And we, we, what we agree on is that there ought to be a contest of opinion and that the truth will be found by truth and error having a battle on a fair field. I can't help but ask. Has the national mood ever been this anxious? Obviously, during the Second World War in times of great emergency, there's a different feeling among the people.

But this sense of chaos, this sense of every day is going to bring some crazy piece of news, Is it comparable to anything in your mind? So I guess the first corrective I always offer when I'm asked that question is, whose past are you talking about? Like if we are talking about the American history and all of the American past and meaning everybody, there is no day before the Emancipation Proclamation that isn't worse than today. Not a single day in all of those centuries. To be born as human chattel and die as human chattel.

is a worse political state of affairs than the fact that our politicians scream at one another and should never be holding office in the first place. This is a bad day. But if we want to think about the past as all of our pasts, then I think we need to have some sense of proportion.

That's not to say we shouldn't be doing everything possible to make the world better now. But I'm just saying like... That's totally fair, Jill. And of course you're right. But does that give you... Does that calm you down?

as a citizen as a human being? You know what I think kind of did this for a lot of people who've been trying to sort of say, well, you know, there's been some bad stuff before, was the detention of babies and toddlers this summer, undocumented immigrants, that that, in the long epic of the American story, that's not worse than Japanese imprisonment during the Second World War.

that's pretty much up there with lynching. Like that is as great immoral travesty and atrocity as anything done in the name of the American people at any point in our history. And so it's hard to look at that and say this is an okay time. Well, there seems to be a push and pull constantly in this history between the forces of forward movement or seeming forward movement and the forces of persistence and regression. So is there always, in the course of American history, the illusion that you can leave something entirely behind or something has been entirely overcome?

I guess I think that notion of the forward progression itself is the illusion, and I don't mean that in a cynical sense. I mean it in the sense that it's quite important to one side of the argument to believe that the direction that the country is going into is sort of forward in time towards in this kind of march of progress. And then it's quite important to the other side and the political argument often to say that the best times were in the past and we need to return to those, you know, the sort of change we can believe in versus make America great again, that just at the simplistic slogan term we're talking about moving into the future

versus turning to the past. And yet as ideologically useful as that has been for narrow partisan political battles, I don't actually think it represents the real patterns to be. be discerned in American past. Jill, I just can't help but say this. First of all, thank you, and I just can't recommend these truths highly enough. It's the most extraordinary, all in one volume of American history that I could imagine and certainly that I've ever read. And I want to thank you. Thank you, David. The title of Jill Lepore's book is These Truths, a History of the United States. You can find more than a decade of her writing for the magazine from originalism on the Supreme Court to the history of Wonder Woman at New Yorker.com.

That's our show for the week. I hope you enjoyed it. Keep in touch with us on Twitter at New Yorker Radio. I'm David Remnick. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Abe Carrillo, Rianning Corby, Jill Duboff, Cala Leah, Karen Fralman, David Krasnow, Louis Mitchell, Sarah Nix, and Stephen Valentino, with help from Emily Mann, Johnny Vince Evans, and Jessica Henderson. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.