Poignant and frustrating read about Brennan-Jobs' strained relationship with her father. Often I wanted to reach into the folds of the book and shield her from her father's cruelty.

Her final visit with him did make me tear up; it's equal parts maddening and humbling to remember that we are all human in the end.

There is a lot of emotional/psychological abuse from both parents in this book, but the writer paints it more as frustrating personality traits then habitual control/insults/etc. It's emotionally intense and melancholy throughout, but i enjoyed it throughout

This was really gripping. The writing is deceptively simple and tells, through the eyes of a child, what a complicated mess/utter asshole Steve Jobs was.
I’m not a memoir/biography kinda person but this was just so engrossing.
Who’d have thought anyone who invented the iPhone could be such a bad man?

I went into this memoir assuming Steve Jobs probably wasn’t going to win any parenting awards, but I was genuinely shocked by some of the things he did and said to his daughter in this book. Refusing to treat her as a family member even when she begged for acknowledgement, repeatedly threatening to disown her if she didn’t blow off school to follow him on random trips to Hawaii or the circus, telling his friends that she wasn’t biologically his daughter but that he ‘tries to be there for her’ while refusing to even see her... these are all bad things. They’re emotionally abusive, narcissistic things. I’ve seen a few reviews saying that it didn’t seem like the author had things so bad, because she was never beaten, but a childhood marked by alternately obsessive, neglectful, and abusive parenting is anything but healthy. She grew up around people with money, but she didn’t grow up in a happy or stable environment. Between her mother’s suicidal rants and repeated insistence that she should never have birthed Lisa, and Steve’s calculated acts of emotional cruelty towards the daughter he still sometimes insisted wasn’t his, Lisa had a lonely, traumatic childhood whose backdrop happened to be a fairly wealthy neighborhood.

Even after her father’s death, Lisa was taken down a few notches by her stepmother, who told her that the deathbed amends Steve tried to make were not genuine, and her step-sister, who introduced her to friends as her father’s “mistake”. All Lisa ever wanted was to be part of a family, but throughout her multi-decade search, every adult in her life punished her for this desire. Even her neighbors, who had been so kind and took her in when her father finally threw her out because she couldn’t join him at the circus when he told her to, refused to attend her college graduation when they found out she had caved to pressure and offered her father a ticket. There were never any right answers available to Lisa, and in total, that’s a very sad way to grow up.

A great, heartbreaking read.

While there are some nice passages, it basically reads like an extremely long People magazine.

Engrossing and mesmerizing, Lisa does an incredible job of throwing descriptively and accurately into the mind of a young adult with dueling conflicts, woven poignantly between the adult revelations regarding her part and complicent roll in them.

Man. I'm always looking for the motivation in other people. We understand that the author's father was a respected innovator. And also, a bad father to her. Was there redemption? Resolution? What could be the point of this book beyond an airing of grievances? I honestly believe that no one should write memoir until they have adult children. Some private moments should remain so. Maybe I just need to take a break from memoirs without happy endings?

At first I was bored because I don't care about Steve Jobs (and also because I have a tough time with people who report clear detailed memories from early childhood), but it's a pretty compelling and well-written memoir and by the end I was hooked.

What did dudes like this do for work before computers existed? Like this kind of personality is so familiar and terrifying.