Steve Jobs' exiled first daughter sums up her relationship with the late Apple genius in her heartbreaking memoir this way: "I was a blot on a spectacular ascent."
In her upcoming book "Small Fry," Lisa Brennan-Jobs bares all on her tumultuous relationship with her father and longtime Apple CEO who at first went to lengths to deny paternity, Business Insider reported.
The painful memoir is due out in September, and an excerpt was published in Vanity Fair this week.
"For him, I was a blot on a spectacular ascent, as our story did not fit with the narrative of greatness and virtue he might have wanted for himself," Brennan-Jobs wrote. "My existence ruined his streak. For me, it was the opposite: the closer I was to him, the less I would feel ashamed; he was part of the world, and he would accelerate me into the light."
Brennan-Jobs didn’t share a normal relationship with her father, which was clear from the day she was born in 1978.
For the first two years he refused to pay child-support and her mother was forced to take on waitressing and house cleaning jobs to supplement her income.
"For a few months we lived in a room in a house that my mother had found on a notice board meant for women considering adoption," Brennan-Jobs wrote, according to Variety.
Things began to change in 1980, when the district attorney of San Mateo County, California, sued Jobs for child-support payments.
He responded by denying paternity, swearing in a deposition that he was sterile and naming another man as Brennan-Jobs' father.
"I was required to take a DNA test," she recalled. "The court required my father to cover welfare back payments, child-support payments of $385 per month, which he increased to $500, and medical insurance until I was 18."
The case was finalized on Dec. 8, 1980, four days before Apple went public.
"Overnight my father was worth more than $200 million," Brennan-Jobs wrote.
She never stopped trying to win him over and he relented a bit as time wore on.
She tells how he once denied to her that he named the Lisa McIntosh after her, and then later hearing him tell U2 frontman Bono that “yup” he did.
Their relationship was never going to be easy, something Brennan-Jobs' finally realized in the weeks before her father died in 2011 from pancreatic cancer.
"Making efforts to see my sick father in his room began to feel like a burden, a nuisance," she said, noting how his new wife and her half-sisters were more accepting. "For the past year I’d visited for a weekend every other month or so. I’d given up on the possibility of a grand reconciliation, the kind in the movies, but I kept coming anyway."
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