Small Fry summary

“It’s not my kid,” Steve repeated. It was 1978, and Steve had just arrived on the farm in Oregon where, a few days earlier, Chrisann had given birth to a baby girl. Steve was there to meet the child he insisted wasn’t his, even voicing this to the people gathered at the farm.

Nonetheless, before he left, Steve helped Chrisann choose a name. They agreed on Lisa.

“I have a secret,” Lisa whispered. “My father is Steve Jobs.”

Lisa was eight years old and she’d recently transferred from a private school to a public school in Palo Alto, California. She wasn’t supposed to divulge her father’s identity due to fears that she might be kidnapped. But the temptation to tell the truth almost always proved too great.

“Do you want to change your name?” Steve Jobs asked.

Lisa had recently moved in with her father and his wife, Laurene. Steve’s question came out of the blue, as they were passing in the hallway.

One morning, Steve and Laurene awoke to find sheets of paper taped across the inside of their home’s hallway windows. The same excited words were written across each sheet, in all caps: “I GOT IN. I GOT IN. I GOT IN.”

Steve didn’t know what the papers meant, so Laurene explained, “She’s into Harvard.”

The summer before Lisa’s senior year at Harvard, Steve asked her to go to the circus. Lisa was back in California, staying at Steve’s house, but on the day he called her, she was with her mom, Chrisann, who was preparing dinner. Lisa’s relationship with Chrisann was improving. At the time, Lisa was unhealthily thin and depressed and the time with her mother felt healing, cozy and calm.

She said she couldn’t go to Cirque du Soleil with Steve, Laurene and their son Reed because she wanted to spend time with her mother. Steve repeated what had become a sort of catchphrase for him: “You’re not being part of this family.” Then he told her that if she didn’t go to the circus, she would need to move out.

Back in 1977 and 1978, prior to Lisa’s birth, Steve had begun developing a new computer, a sort of grandfather to the Macintosh. It hit the market after she was born, and he named it the Lisa. The computer wasn’t a success. It was too expensive for the time, and it was soon discontinued. As a child, when she’d felt the need to tell her school friends the secret of her father’s identity, Lisa would sometimes mention that Steve had named a computer after her.

When she moved in with her father, she’d asked him point blank if it was named after her. His response was curt and decisive: “Nope.” Later, with Lisa present, Laurene had asked Steve on her behalf. But Steve had denied it again, saying it was named after “an old girlfriend.”