Small Fry: A Memoir

👍🏽Pick it: If you're looking for a refreshing take on the often-exhausting memoir.

👎🏽Skip it: If you're not quite ready to part from your Steve Jobs' shrine.

Small Fry was the best Memoir of 2018. Yeah, I said it. I shy away from this genre because I naively have always believed memoirs either serve as a humble-brag or a woe-is-me rant. Small Fry humbled my ignorance. Brennan-Jobs respected her exclusive position and responsibility to peel back the curtain of the mysterious tech-God, bizarre visionary, Steve Jobs. Instead of using the book as a posthumous bashing of an absent Papa Jobs, she moved me by simply telling her story-unbiased and reader all insight, no fluff. The result: an untheatrical confidence that'll move anyone who has a child is a child, or craves love, no matter how far removed.

I've read a lot of memoirs this year that touch on the nature of memory and how the act of remembering shapes us as we grow older. Small Fry is about a woman growing up in the shadow of an industry giant and everything that comes with that. It's about adults failing to see how their actions affect the development of the child in their care and the lasting consequences that can have - well into that child's adulthood.

Brennan-Jobs does an excellent job of describing the Bay Area in the 80s and 90s as well as describing the coping mechanisms we develop when surrounded by untrustworthy adults. A difficult but worthwhile read.

Girl grows up with(out) shitty absent father. Grown woman writes about it. Would this book have been published if the shitty father in question was not a celebrity? I like to think so, but I like to think it would've then been better. One curse of fame is that editors are reluctant to trim. So many details felt contrived: “The air smelled of eucalyptus and sunshine-warmed dirt, moisture, cut grass” (writing about when she was seven); the exact clothes people were wearing at one not-particularly-memorable moment twenty years ago. The reader grants some license in a memoir — dialog would be impossible — but this felt like too much.

Come to think of it, that's the thing: this didn't feel like a memoir. Not bildungsroman either, although lukewarm points to Brennan-Jobs for trying at the end. There just wasn't enough author in it: in this solar system all attention goes to the planets orbiting the timid sun. (And I am trying to be gentle, to understand the author's dilemma). Brennan-Jobs shows promise as a writer: I'm glad she got this book out of her system, and hope she enjoyed the writing journey, because I do look forward to reading more from her. In another genre.

And, lest you be tempted to judge Steve Jobs: go for it. With my blessing. There's not much controversy about him being a jerk. But then, while you're still feeling that self-satisfied glow, you could try asking yourself: is there anyone in my life who might see me as a jerk? Because sometimes there is, for most of us, and it's a jerk move to resolve things on one's deathbed — or not at all.