Steve Jobs Told His Daughter She “Smelled Like A Toilet”

Lisa Brennan-Jobs has revealed some shocking revelations about her father and co-founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, in a new memoir, Small Fry.
In the  excerpt which appeared in Vanity Fair’s September issue, she discloses that she and her father had a troubled relationship yet maintained visiting her father while he suffered from pancreatic cancer in 2011.

During one of the visits, she writes that she sprayed the expensive rose facial. Mist in his bathroom.

“When we hugged, I could feel his vertebrae, his ribs. He smelled musty, like medicine sweat”. After that,  the following conversation ensued:

“Lis?”

“Yeah?”.

“You smell like a toilet”

This heightened the relationship damage she was trying to rebuild and made her give up on “the possibility of a grand reconciliation, the kind in the movies”.

She also wrote that he denied being her father publicly when her mother gave birth to her in 1978 for two years and only accepted because after he was forced to take a paternity test. She wrote that he also denied that one of his computers “The Lisa” was named after her. It was not until a trip with her step-siblings when she was 27 that he admitted it.

“My father hesitated, looked down at his plate for a long moment, and then back at Bono. ‘Yeah, it was,’ he said. “I studied my father’s face. What had changed? Why had he admitted it now, after all these years? Of course, it was named after me, I thought then. His lie seemed preposterous now. I felt a new power that pulled my chest up.” she wrote.

Also, she notes that her father refused to give her the extra Porshes he had despite rumours of buying new ones whenever he scratches one.

“Absolutely not,’ he said in such a sour, biting way that I knew I’d made a mistake,… I wished I could take it back. We pulled up to the house and he turned off the engine. Before I made a move to get out he turned to face me.
“‘You’re not getting anything,’ he said. ‘You understand? Nothing. You’re getting nothing.’ Did he mean about the car, something else, bigger? I didn’t know. His voice hurt—sharp, in my chest.”

But she will like to remember him so:

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 colour of old teeth.

The memoir will be published on Sept 4 by Grove Press.