It would have been easy for Steve Jobs’ (pictured) daughter Lisa to have written a memoir portraying her father as a monster. Easy – and even predictable, given that he was regarded, in his and Apple’s heyday, as not just a computer genius but a visionary, almost a cult leader, who brought the digital revolution to the desks and pockets of the world. How likely was it that such a man would have normal paternal habits or feelings?
As this beautifully written and psychologically acute book shows, Jobs’ behaviour towards his eldest child and her mother, Chrisann, his high-school sweetheart (they never married), was often monstrous. But though she does not spare him, Lisa is not out to punish her father. She writes simply and factually as the child and adolescent she was. She does not need to be judgemental. The story speaks for itself.