Chrisann Brennan’s Steve Jobs Memoir Is More Buddhist Than Brutal
Despite his cruelty, Jobs’ ex seems as enthralled by him in death as she was in life
If you were to believe the hype, Chrisann Brennan’s freshly published book, The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs, about her time as a young woman dating the Apple co-founder, is an evisceration of his legacy. Headlines such as “Steve Jobs’ ex-girlfriend pens memoir on life with ‘vicious’ Apple founder” (The Guardian) and “Steve Jobs Ex-Lover Chrisann Brennan Claims the Apple Co-Founder was an Awful, Extremely Dark Person” (Celeb Dirty Laundry) highlight only one side of Brennan’s story, painting a portrait of a revenge-fueled tell-all. The articles putting forth this image of the scorned woman, based largely on a single excerpt in The New York Post, fail to capture the ways Brennan both upholds and, at times glorifies, Jobs’ mystique as a tortured genius.
Perhaps the scorned woman seeking revenge is our simplest way of describing a woman reflecting on loving one of the world’s most powerful men, and the reason for the one-note takes on the book. But assuming the “bite” in the title is one intended to wound is a misreading of the book; Brennan’s anger is muted by her fascination with Jobs’ grandeur and ability to enthrall. Her descriptions of seemingly everyday acts take on grandiose tones. Of their early relationship, she writes, “he was important to me in some inexplicable mountain range of a way.” She rhapsodizes about the act of seeing him cooking brown rice:
Even the long-handled saucepan that held it was beautiful. This approach to cooking rice was so completely new to me that it set off a small revolution inside me.
On him watching TV:
Completely engaged, he strained to collect and calculate, peering into the TV as if he was trying to see around doorways and through walls. To this day, I have never seen anyone watch TV as he did.
The descriptions of these smaller moments offset his crueler side, which she seems to want to find a way to explain or mitigate, to find a reason for his negative behavior. What may come across to the reader as “vicious” and “dark,” as in the headlines quoted above, for Brennan are less deliberate acts than Jobs acting out or exorcising his demons. Examples of Jobs’ lies, both to her and to others, permeate the book, yet Brennan seems to come around to an acceptance of this practice of prevarication:
It may be that, for Steve, deception was a radical form of creating… But it seems to me that he also lied to study people’s responses in order to gather intelligence.
To put so much thought into why someone would lie repeatedly seems almost like looking for an excuse for it.
In the end I found it disturbing not because he lied, but because he used a masterful awareness of other people’s blind spots to create and manage perception for personal advantage.
One of the turning points in the book comes after she gives birth to their daughter, Lisa. Jobs alternates between being a proud parent, complete with photo of him holding his baby, to claiming to wanting nothing to do with her. Brennan writes of him saying to his friends, in response to her requests for child support, “She doesn’t want money, she just wants me.” But even as she writes of being too overwhelmed with caring for her daughter for this to possibly be true, she is not irate.
The real truth was that I didn’t want to mess up Steve’s trajectory because, despite everything, I was excited for him and his potential.
The most egregious claim in the book, which isn’t even under dispute is that Jobs initially disavowed paternity of his daughter Lisa, telling Time Magazine “28% of the male population in the United States could be the father.” This isn’t news, nor are Brennan’s thoughts on it; she was quoted in Walter Isaacson’s voluminous biography Steve Jobs saying, “He was going to drag me through court with a little baby and try to prove I was a whore and that anyone could have been the father of that baby.” While Brennan does indeed explore the hurt caused by this episode, for the most part, the memoir focuses less on Jobs’ faults and more on his redeeming qualities, despite those faults. My initial reaction as I started this memoir was: how could Brennan not want to at least settle the playing field?
Yet rather than rail against Jobs, she lets his actions speak for themselves. She’s not applauding him denying paternity or turning standoffish on a whim, but her focus is more on understanding his actions than excoriating them. Brennan is as protective at times of her former lover as she is of her daughter. Often it’s her tone rather than the bare facts she lays out that offers up this effect; one gets the sense that she wants to forgive Jobs for his worst anti-social excesses, and give the reader a reason to pardon him as well. This caretaking is something perhaps Jobs saw when, as she recounts, he “said that he loved how much I parented so much, he wished I had been his mother.” That version of her throughout the book circles back to his adoption, suggesting that the uncertainty of not knowing who his birth parents were until later in life haunted him.
It’s a testament to the enormity of both the man and the myth of him that Brennan considered suicide after being uninvited to Jobs’ memorial service after she allowed Rolling Stone to reprint a reflection from her. In both the vivid way she recalls him engaging in everyday activities and her delving into his psychology, she seems to be both hoping for him to have learned some sort of lesson from the same Buddhist teachers they shared, and lamenting that he never quite reached that level of enlightenment.
At the start of the book, I found this literary devotion frustrating; I couldn’t see how he deserved it. As Cult of Mac—one of the rare reviewers to delve into the entire book rather than simply its more salacious claims—put it, Brennan’s memoir “feels less like a cynical cash-in than it does a wounded love letter to a man the author never quite cracked the surface of.” Only as I kept reading, and even reread some of the passages, did I start to see that revenge was never her purpose in writing the book in the first place; indeed, it would be highly out of place with her Buddhist spiritual beliefs, which permeate her story. Brennan seems to be trying to come to grips with the hold Jobs held over her.
In Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, Beth Kephart explains, “If you want to write memoir, you need to set caterwauling narcissism to the side. You need to soften your stance. You need to work through the explosives—anger, aggrandizement, injustice, misfortune, despair, fumes—toward mercy.” To an almost shocking degree, Brennan does this, while never once letting Jobs off the hook for his bad behavior. It’s rather that, she ultimately chose to both move on with her life and retain a kind of love for Jobs that seems to flow through the pages in a way that often paints him as almost otherworldly.
In response to Walter Isaacson’s biography, Tim McNichol wrote of Jobs’ managerial style, “Being an asshole was part of the Steve package, but it wasn't essential to his success.” In more poetic, spiritual, and artful tones, this is perhaps also Brennan’s message to both the world, and the Jobs she once knew—that he could and would have succeeded anyway, without the lying and distancing and mind games.
