Speaker 1: Family Secrets as a production of I Heart Radio. In
Speaker 1: between visits, I saw my father all around New York.
Speaker 1: I saw him sitting in a movie theater, the exact
Speaker 1: curve of his neck to jaw to cheekbone. I saw
Speaker 1: him as I ran along the Hudson River in winter,
Speaker 1: sitting on a bench looking at the dock boats, and
Speaker 1: on my subway, revived the work, walking away on the
Speaker 1: platform through the crowd, thin men, olive skinned, fine fingered,
Speaker 1: slim wristed, double bearded, who at certain angles looked just
Speaker 1: like him. Each time I had to get closer to
Speaker 1: check my heart in my throat, even though I knew
Speaker 1: it could not possibly be him, because he was sick
Speaker 1: in bed in California. Before this, during years in which
Speaker 1: we hardly spoke, I had seen his picture everywhere. Seeing
Speaker 1: the pictures gave me a strange thing. The feeling was
Speaker 1: familiar to catching a glimpse of myself in a mirror
Speaker 1: across the room and thinking it was someone else, and
Speaker 1: then realizing it was my own faith Darry was peering
Speaker 1: up for magazines and newspapers and screens in whatever city
Speaker 1: I was in. That is my father, and no one
Speaker 1: knows it, but it's true. That's Lisa Brennan Jobs, reading
Speaker 1: from her first memoir, Small Fry. Lisa's story is both
Speaker 1: about having a secret and being a secret. What's your
Speaker 1: life like when your father, the father who initially did
Speaker 1: not believe you were his, The father who only reluctantly
Speaker 1: claimed you after he was forced to take a fraternity test,
Speaker 1: The father who kept you at arm's length all your life,
Speaker 1: is one of the most famous, powerful, and wealthiest men
Speaker 1: in the world. Here's just a bit more from Lisa
Speaker 1: before we dive into our conversation. I have a secret,
Speaker 1: I said to my new friends at school. I whispered
Speaker 1: it so they would see I was reluctant to mention it.
Speaker 1: The key I felt was to underplay. My father is
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs. Who is that? One asked, He's famous? I said,
Speaker 1: he invented the personal computer. He lives in a mansion
Speaker 1: and drives a Porsche convertible. He buys a new one
Speaker 1: every time I gets a scratch. The story had a
Speaker 1: film of unreality to it, as I said it, even
Speaker 1: to my own ears. I hadn't hung out with him
Speaker 1: that much, only a few skates and visits. I didn't
Speaker 1: have the clothes or the bike. Someone with a father
Speaker 1: like this would have. My last name was different from his.
Speaker 1: He even named a computer after me. I said to them,
Speaker 1: what computer. A girl named Elizabeth asked the Lisa. I said,
Speaker 1: a computer called the Lisa. She said, I never heard
Speaker 1: of it. It was ahead of its time. I used
Speaker 1: my mother's phrase, although I wasn't sure why it was ahead.
Speaker 1: He visited the personal computer later. But you can't tell
Speaker 1: anyone because if someone finds out, I could get kidnapped.
Speaker 1: I brought it up when I felt I needed to,
Speaker 1: waiting as long as I could, and then letting it
Speaker 1: burst forth. I don't remember feeling at a disadvantage with
Speaker 1: my friends who had others, only that there was at
Speaker 1: my fingertips another magical identity, an extra thing that started
Speaker 1: to itch and tangle when I felt small, and it
Speaker 1: was like a pressure building inside me. And then I
Speaker 1: had to find a way to say it. She had
Speaker 1: to find a way to say it. Isn't that what
Speaker 1: this show is all about? So many of us are
Speaker 1: trying to find a way to say it. Whatever it is,
Speaker 1: this thing that wasn't allowed to be spoken. I'm Danny Shapiro,
Speaker 1: and this is family secrets. The secrets that are kept
Speaker 1: from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the
Speaker 1: secrets we keep from ourselves. So I missed it a lot. Actually,
Speaker 1: the air in California and northern California knows of disks.
Speaker 1: They're towering and there's silvery, and they have these size
Speaker 1: in half moon knees that dangle down and shiver in
Speaker 1: the wind. And they have these beautiful kind of button
Speaker 1: shaped seeds that plunk on those ceilings and fall on
Speaker 1: the roads, and they are kind of silvery too, and perfumed.
Speaker 1: My mother was saying that they're not native to the
Speaker 1: area and that their roots systems are really shallow, so
Speaker 1: they can fall over. She said this when I was younger,
Speaker 1: and I I held onto this idea, and I remember
Speaker 1: when we would drive to the beach, which was up
Speaker 1: this curvy road all the way over the hills and
Speaker 1: then down to the Pacific Ocean. There was a line
Speaker 1: of eucalyptus trees, and every time we would have to
Speaker 1: go through that long tree lined road, I would hold
Speaker 1: my breath with terror that these trees would fall down
Speaker 1: on us. And then many years later said, oh, no, sweetheart,
Speaker 1: no trees falling very slowly, but anyway, the air smelled
Speaker 1: the people lift and danger. The earliest home I think
Speaker 1: I remember was this place as the sort of the
Speaker 1: batch house of the house in Memmo Park and no
Speaker 1: are remember being in a shower with my mother and
Speaker 1: she was the hot water and the cold water were
Speaker 1: coming on. We were alternating them for some reason, and
Speaker 1: she was yelling like closed poors, open pours, and I
Speaker 1: was yelling it with her, and I think there was
Speaker 1: a curtain, and then we would go outside. At that
Speaker 1: house there was theater. The house was small that there
Speaker 1: was quite the garden because the main house was surrounded
Speaker 1: by land. This house is a kind of house on
Speaker 1: spilt on a hill that was really falling apart a
Speaker 1: little bit, the one with the trellis roses, and there
Speaker 1: was ivy on one side where I would go and
Speaker 1: play beside the big oak tree on my own. Or
Speaker 1: was the boy who lived there with his mother also
Speaker 1: we were renting a room. And now that house has
Speaker 1: been all fixed up. It looks really nice because that
Speaker 1: doesn't look anymore like it's going to fall down the
Speaker 1: hill or like the wood is old. It looks like
Speaker 1: a shiny, polished version of its old self when we
Speaker 1: lived in a bunch of houses. I think I've removed
Speaker 1: searching times before I was seven, but by the time
Speaker 1: I was seven. What was it like to move thirteen
Speaker 1: times in the first seven years of your life? I
Speaker 1: mean both what was it like then? And like, how
Speaker 1: do you think about that now? It's hard to know
Speaker 1: what it was like then. I remember my mother being
Speaker 1: very sad. I think maybe she was probably depressed and
Speaker 1: probably just completely overwhelmed with our money less circumstances, and
Speaker 1: how she would kind of sit in one of these
Speaker 1: rooms in the dark, and I would feel embarrassed because
Speaker 1: in this one's house that we're moving into, it was
Speaker 1: our own house. We were the ones who had our
Speaker 1: name on the lease, and I remember the des fiction,
Speaker 1: oh my god, we're moving into a place that's just ours.
Speaker 1: And I also remember noticing that we really didn't have
Speaker 1: any furniture. So I had these moments of feeling a
Speaker 1: distance from my own circumstances and of irthing them, maybe
Speaker 1: because I've been to other people's houses. We lived at
Speaker 1: one place over the summer that was full of furniture.
Speaker 1: We stub led it from somewhere too was away, and
Speaker 1: they had a television, and I remember watching Jethany Street
Speaker 1: and they had so much furniture that right now, the
Speaker 1: way I imagine it was the kind of a hoarder's paradise,
Speaker 1: but in fact it might have just been a very well,
Speaker 1: normally furnished house. You know. It wasn't necessarily something I
Speaker 1: was looking at anthropologically, because it was my life and
Speaker 1: I was so young I didn't really know any different.
Speaker 1: And yet there were ploys when I remember thinking, oh,
Speaker 1: that's different than what might be normal. And I think
Speaker 1: that children will take these moments that are mysterious and
Speaker 1: sort of box them up for later. And I think
Speaker 1: that because I think during the process of writing a
Speaker 1: memoir it was it was an unboxing. In other words,
Speaker 1: the stories that I would remember, we're the ones that
Speaker 1: where things happened that does not make sense to me
Speaker 1: at the time, and that is why I had wrapped
Speaker 1: them up and saved them for all that time. One
Speaker 1: of these boxed up moments happens in a car after
Speaker 1: Lisa and her mom have taken a road trip to
Speaker 1: Harbor Hot Springs and everything that can possibly go wrong does.
Speaker 1: Her mother gets lost, the car breaks down. They're hungry, tired,
Speaker 1: and completely without resources, and her mother just loses it,
Speaker 1: completely loses it, and essentially has a nervous collapse right
Speaker 1: there in the car in front of her four year
Speaker 1: old daughter, in what must have been a frightening combination
Speaker 1: of terror and rage. There's this moment where you write,
Speaker 1: at the height of her hopelessness and noise, that felt
Speaker 1: a calm presence near us, even though I knew we
Speaker 1: were alone in the water. We held the car jerking,
Speaker 1: some benevolent presence that cared for us but could not interfere.
Speaker 1: Maybe sitting in the back seat, can you say more
Speaker 1: about that benevolent presence and whether that's something that kind
Speaker 1: of accompanied you at other times. You were very young
Speaker 1: when you had that thought, right, I think it was
Speaker 1: for And I talked to my mother about that later
Speaker 1: after I had written it. I was mentioning this moment
Speaker 1: you talked about in the car driving back from this
Speaker 1: little sort of break we took, driving back to our home.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, you know, we don't have money, we
Speaker 1: don't have to support There's a sense of shame in
Speaker 1: society for her role, and she feels as very acute way.
Speaker 1: She is a married woman with an illegitimate child, and
Speaker 1: she's thought that she would ever have thought of me
Speaker 1: in that way. But Reagan is talking about, well, her
Speaker 1: mother is and single mothers, and my father is saying
Speaker 1: that she essentially slept with lots of people, and she
Speaker 1: she hadn't and then it wasn't his kid, and you know,
Speaker 1: it's just shame upon Shane. And she had had her
Speaker 1: own test things in her childhood. And so she she's
Speaker 1: screaming kind of at the universe, but I'm there. And
Speaker 1: she said later when I asked her about it, that
Speaker 1: she she's had other moments like that before that on,
Speaker 1: but that at that moment she realized, oh, and he's
Speaker 1: just going to remember this later. You know, there was
Speaker 1: I was past the veil where memories disappear, and oh god,
Speaker 1: I remember being terrified, and I remember if I didn't
Speaker 1: keep a hold of myself, I might not realize how
Speaker 1: weird certain things were. And I wanted certain things to
Speaker 1: be weird because I didn't want them to be my life.
Speaker 1: And that's another kind of disassociatures other presence in the car,
Speaker 1: I guess the psychological model has named this phenomenon, which
Speaker 1: is in a moment of extreme stress, the t sect
Speaker 1: and becomes too our calmness finds another ground or something
Speaker 1: like that is dissociation as defense. Right. I felt when
Speaker 1: I was writing the book, like, oh my god, that's
Speaker 1: the purpose of this book. In a certain way. I
Speaker 1: get to go back and keep myself company. I get
Speaker 1: to go back as a steady hand as someone is
Speaker 1: to some degree made it out fine to all the
Speaker 1: difficult times of my childhood when I didn't know if
Speaker 1: we would make it out fine. And I can't influence anything,
Speaker 1: but I get it's gonna sit in the backseat and
Speaker 1: be this presence. Describe your mother to me. My mother
Speaker 1: is humanist. I think if she's not creative, if she's
Speaker 1: not expressing herself artistically, even in one day, she feels
Speaker 1: disconnected from herself and becomes depressed. She decided when I
Speaker 1: was born that she was going to become she was
Speaker 1: going to be a mother and an artist, that she
Speaker 1: was going to do them both, and she's pursued that
Speaker 1: fairly intensely. She is very beautiful. I think she's really blunt.
Speaker 1: She's really honest. She will tell the truth without thinking
Speaker 1: of the consequences, because the truth is the only important
Speaker 1: thing to her. Was that also true for you, you
Speaker 1: were a child. There was a kind of like she
Speaker 1: wasn't going to soften it so much for a child.
Speaker 1: She was gonna And I don't mean it's in a
Speaker 1: kind of crying in the car way, like that was
Speaker 1: an art extraordinary circumstance. But I mean she would get
Speaker 1: mary mad at me. For example, if I talked about
Speaker 1: good guys and bad guys, which I see now children
Speaker 1: doing all the time. It must have always been interposed childhood.
Speaker 1: But if I would talk about good guys, she'd get furious.
Speaker 1: This was useful to Lisa later, this talk of good
Speaker 1: guys and bad guys. Her mom also talked about not
Speaker 1: looking at things in black and white, but there were
Speaker 1: many shades, many colors, also useful later. She was young.
Speaker 1: She was so young. She was younger than everyone else's mother.
Speaker 1: She was more beautiful, she was more fun, I think
Speaker 1: in certain ways. But we would go and get coffee,
Speaker 1: we would take walks and would go to hike. And
Speaker 1: how old was she when she had you? She was
Speaker 1: twenty three. She has a quality where she will sometimes
Speaker 1: bite the hand that sees her. This feels like part
Speaker 1: of this honesty, but I'm not sure if it always is,
Speaker 1: and that quality was frustrating to me when I was
Speaker 1: a kid. I would have rather lied to make things
Speaker 1: comfortable for us, and that was not the way she operated.
Speaker 1: Tell me your first memory of hearing about your father.
Speaker 1: So at some point, I guess we came back from
Speaker 1: Tahoe when I was four, and apparently he picked us
Speaker 1: up in this porsche. I sat on my mother's lap,
Speaker 1: those were the days, right in the frost seats, and
Speaker 1: we drove to his He just bought this mansion and
Speaker 1: wood side, and he bought it for the land and
Speaker 1: had these big, old, beautiful, huge oak trees, and he
Speaker 1: said the house was shipped and they had an elevator,
Speaker 1: and I discovered it, or I felt I discovered it
Speaker 1: and had an organ room start of going up and
Speaker 1: down the elevator and I'm playing the organ. I mean,
Speaker 1: organs is a church organ, so there's like rooms full
Speaker 1: of pipes. At some point you gave me an apricot
Speaker 1: from the orchard, and it was just like the best
Speaker 1: thing I've ever had. And then I think we didn't
Speaker 1: really start to get to know each other again. When
Speaker 1: I was seven or eight, and I remember going back
Speaker 1: to that mansion with him alone where I knew there
Speaker 1: was an elevator and there was a church organ and
Speaker 1: I knew that he didn't love that. I was fascinated
Speaker 1: bordering on a set with those things. There was a
Speaker 1: lot of silence. I think in retrospect he was very awkward,
Speaker 1: and I think extraordinary and sort of groups and then
Speaker 1: sometimes maybe much quieter one on one. Also, he was
Speaker 1: getting to know his daughter for the first time, which
Speaker 1: I can only imagine for somebody who maybe he wasn't
Speaker 1: even particularly good with kids, who maybe felt ashamed he
Speaker 1: hadn't been there earlier. And also we don't realize that
Speaker 1: kids that kids can be a little scary when you're
Speaker 1: an adult, when you don't know how to talk with
Speaker 1: them and they don't respond the way adults do to reything.
Speaker 1: Someone told me that the charms that worked on everyone
Speaker 1: else didn't necessarily worked on me. And so then what
Speaker 1: did he have. I've never seen someone dressed so well.
Speaker 1: I remember that, and I wouldn't have been able to
Speaker 1: put it in those words as a kid. And it
Speaker 1: wasn't like he wore anything particularly fancy, but at that
Speaker 1: point he was, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars,
Speaker 1: so his sweaters. They weren't particularly fancy or anything, but
Speaker 1: they were like a league different than anything I'd seen.
Speaker 1: Is like he'd be wearing ripped up jeans. But then
Speaker 1: there'd be something about his shoes. You know, with our clothes,
Speaker 1: we wear them a bunch, washed a bunch, and they'd
Speaker 1: get worn, the colors would fade, and maybe they'd be
Speaker 1: a little tattered, and they they'd be a little wrinkly
Speaker 1: from folding. And I think probably with his they were
Speaker 1: in the drawer and maybe worn only a few times,
Speaker 1: and they were crisp. But I remember that some puzzlement
Speaker 1: about the way that he looked in the smells, the
Speaker 1: smells of new clothes, and then finding it comforting because
Speaker 1: it was almost like he was an emissary from another world,
Speaker 1: a world that smells different. Maybe that smells European, right,
Speaker 1: These clothes were probably perfumed, the package spent over. He
Speaker 1: drove fast, not particularly well. The fat his car was rumbly.
Speaker 1: All of the machines around him Nate noises that I
Speaker 1: that were new to me. Again, they were probably your apacist.
Speaker 1: There was a feeling of of magic when he was
Speaker 1: around who they was special. He would come by oh,
Speaker 1: your guy's coming by, you know, um, maybe we would
Speaker 1: go for a skate. And he sort of walked in
Speaker 1: this way where he seemed to fall forward and then
Speaker 1: bounce up and fall forward. And I remember that, and
Speaker 1: his hair was so dark, and even now just describing it,
Speaker 1: just this feeling of love welling up at me right now,
Speaker 1: even just like, oh, this one, this is the one
Speaker 1: that I got, and how wonderful he is because he
Speaker 1: was had a certain sweetness to him, and I I
Speaker 1: want to say charmed, but I don't think that doesn't
Speaker 1: justice because it went all the way to the core.
Speaker 1: We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 1: Lisa inhabits a world of contrasts that she feels into
Speaker 1: its rather than comprehends. This is the way it is
Speaker 1: in childhood, even in our teenage years. We don't yet
Speaker 1: have the tools will develop later to be able to
Speaker 1: think through, analyze, understand, so we're left with what we
Speaker 1: sense and feel in our bodies. And what Lisa felt
Speaker 1: was the difference between the way her mother and her
Speaker 1: father moved through the world. Her mother's life was pinched
Speaker 1: and closed, anxious, pressed, defined by limitation, and her father,
Speaker 1: though He didn't live or act like a typical rich person.
Speaker 1: He wore jeans and T shirts, lived in a crumbling mansion.
Speaker 1: He moved through the world with a sense of possibility
Speaker 1: and openness. How old were you when he suggested that
Speaker 1: you come live with him? My moment, I was having
Speaker 1: horrible fights. I think that she kind of had a crisis.
Speaker 1: I mean understandably, I think in the sense that she
Speaker 1: had been raising me alone with for a large part,
Speaker 1: very very limited support, and then I started kind of
Speaker 1: taking off in a certain way. I was in a
Speaker 1: great school, I was doing really well. All I wanted
Speaker 1: to do was study, and she was kind of the
Speaker 1: the support staff she was made and this probably cast
Speaker 1: her back to having always been the maid. And her
Speaker 1: life was spluttering. She was breaking up with her boyfriend
Speaker 1: of many years, and I think just everything was really
Speaker 1: hard for her at that moment, and so we were
Speaker 1: getting into horrible fights. And also I was like a
Speaker 1: kind of, you know, a little bit shitty in the
Speaker 1: sense that I didn't want to do the dishes. I
Speaker 1: wanted to do my homework and I have, of course,
Speaker 1: it's fair to help your parents with the dishes. I
Speaker 1: think it was also like she would kind of naked,
Speaker 1: as miserable as it could be, because she was in rage.
Speaker 1: And that's why I didn't want to do the dishes
Speaker 1: with her, like I didn't want to participate in this,
Speaker 1: in this anymore. And she was getting worse, and I
Speaker 1: felt I was getting better. And then also to my father,
Speaker 1: who had turned his back on me when I was
Speaker 1: little and then had increasingly become a part of my life,
Speaker 1: I was now someone he could be proud of. Right,
Speaker 1: I was doing really well in school, I was. I
Speaker 1: know that soundsinical. I think in some ways it was
Speaker 1: like I've gotten all shined up to the point where
Speaker 1: he'd own me. I don't know that's terrible, but he
Speaker 1: probably didn't necessarily want to take me any Just about
Speaker 1: to have a baby, he has a new, very new wife.
Speaker 1: Um he says he's moved to Palaso a few blocks away.
Speaker 1: Later I asked him why, and he said, to be
Speaker 1: close to me. He offered to have me move with him.
Speaker 1: But it wasn't an offer that was necessarily full of joy.
Speaker 1: It was almost a full of necessity. Was it? His
Speaker 1: rules though, that that you not see your mother for
Speaker 1: six months if you moved in with him, or where
Speaker 1: did that come from. Was it protective of you because
Speaker 1: things were so rough with your mother, or was it
Speaker 1: controlling or or something else. He's just someone who doesn't
Speaker 1: know what he's necessarily doing in the emotional sphere. Is
Speaker 1: trying to help me in some ways to try and
Speaker 1: stay from what has become a terrible environment with my mother,
Speaker 1: and doesn't know how to love very easily when he
Speaker 1: doesn't have any control. And I think, if I move
Speaker 1: over to his house two blocks away from my mother,
Speaker 1: and then I'm just still going over to my mother's
Speaker 1: house all this time, and perhaps she's yelling at me,
Speaker 1: who knows what he's thinking. I mean, if I put
Speaker 1: it terribly towards him, if I'm seeing my mother all
Speaker 1: the time, he has no way of making sure I'm okay.
Speaker 1: And so that's that's what he invented, and then the
Speaker 1: rules around that. I think we're six months. I remember
Speaker 1: that kind of vaguely. It was a horrible crime, as
Speaker 1: you could imagine. I remember a certain relief, like a
Speaker 1: few I get to not see my mother, but I'm
Speaker 1: not at fault for it, you know, So, so in
Speaker 1: the beginning it was just relief, like I get to
Speaker 1: move away, and it's my father's fault that I don't
Speaker 1: have to see my mother, you know, because I'm so
Speaker 1: angry with her, I'm so tired and spice and so
Speaker 1: I'm this sort of moratorium on contact is a relief
Speaker 1: for me. I mean, there would have been a million
Speaker 1: ways to do it better, like we we all probably
Speaker 1: should have gone to see a therapist. But I don't
Speaker 1: think my father really believed in seeing a therapist, because
Speaker 1: you know, obviously people who don't believe in therapists usually
Speaker 1: there's something lurking under their right. But yeah, that was
Speaker 1: a real thoughts job. I think telling me that they
Speaker 1: can't see their mother for takes months. We needed some
Speaker 1: real help, not some superficial kind of band aid regulated
Speaker 1: controlling help. We needed real help. And I think he
Speaker 1: was part of the problem of why we had ended
Speaker 1: up there, why my mother was in such trouble, and
Speaker 1: he took on some of solving that problem. He was
Speaker 1: paying for my school, he was paying for my therapist,
Speaker 1: going to a great school. I had a great therapist,
Speaker 1: But he didn't really take it off and I both
Speaker 1: understand it and I was sad about it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that makes a lot of sense. There's a part of
Speaker 1: what you write about once you're there, you know, once
Speaker 1: you're living in that home with he and his new wife,
Speaker 1: and then your baby brother is born, and you describe
Speaker 1: really powerfully sort of the anxiety that sets in. And
Speaker 1: one of those ways is your hands, and that you
Speaker 1: keep on like breaking glasses like you literally can't get
Speaker 1: a grip. I think it's like some mix of adolescence
Speaker 1: and destabilization. I just couldn't. I seem to want to
Speaker 1: be pleasing. I was. I was such a sleezer and
Speaker 1: will just leaser. Wanted to sit in and wanted to
Speaker 1: be loved, wanted to be necessary, needed, enjoyed. And yet
Speaker 1: I keep on breaking glasses all over the kitchen floor,
Speaker 1: like every day, every day at dinner, and I sit
Speaker 1: down at dinner, can get pay LESA not a glasses.
Speaker 1: I'm not a glasses. Time don't And I'm so careful
Speaker 1: and I'm so careful and I make it through me
Speaker 1: and I almost said through the meal and then booth
Speaker 1: something my elbows chest out when I'm reaching for my
Speaker 1: last bite, whoever it is, and they're another book and
Speaker 1: glass shutters on the floor, Oh Lasa, and I must
Speaker 1: have felt it was such a difficulty, such a trial
Speaker 1: and an annoyance to have this needy teenager in their
Speaker 1: midst who's constantly breaking glasses on the on the floor
Speaker 1: where their child is stepping. It's like every night just
Speaker 1: promising myself I wasn't going to do the worst thing,
Speaker 1: and then just despite all of my efforts, And this
Speaker 1: is after I had been so beloved in my schools,
Speaker 1: and and I've just switched WOLS and I don't know anybody,
Speaker 1: but I so beloved in my school that I've always
Speaker 1: had friends, and suddenly I can't make friends, and I
Speaker 1: can't I can't seem to be beloved and needed, and
Speaker 1: I keep on pushing myself away from the very thing
Speaker 1: I think I want, which is somehow to just be included,
Speaker 1: to be necessary, to be family. So it isn't a
Speaker 1: particularly good time in the Job's family. There's a new baby,
Speaker 1: an unhappy, awkward, accident prone teenager, the marriage is new
Speaker 1: and tense, and Lisa's father's new company isn't going well.
Speaker 1: Lisa's new stepmother is constitutionally not a warm person, even
Speaker 1: under the best of circumstances, which these are not. Lisa's
Speaker 1: feeling the tension in the home and absorbing it in
Speaker 1: a way, becoming the physical embodiment of it. She's sort
Speaker 1: of the black sheep the lightning rod. There's something going
Speaker 1: on with everybody, but it keeps getting expressed through her.
Speaker 1: So they go see a therapist, Lisa, her stepmother and
Speaker 1: her father, and in response to Lisa's loneliness and pain,
Speaker 1: her stepmother says, we're just cold people with honest like girlfriends.
Speaker 1: You're barking up the wrong tree. We cannot give you
Speaker 1: this thing you watched. He was gonna have to find
Speaker 1: it other ways. Not that she said it that way.
Speaker 1: Even maybe that's okay. We are all not omni capacity people,
Speaker 1: and maybe the worst thing in life is to lie
Speaker 1: about it. Maybe we have to be straightforward about our limitations.
Speaker 1: So at the same time as I find it a
Speaker 1: shocking admission and a shocking sense to say to someone
Speaker 1: in high school or something, I also find it refreshing
Speaker 1: and interesting and honest. And my father, actually, even or
Speaker 1: wasn't a cold person, kind of added up to that
Speaker 1: in a certain way because you couldn't depend on the warmth.
Speaker 1: It was so intermittent and unpredictable. He was passionate, even warm,
Speaker 1: and he was cold when he was enraged, you know,
Speaker 1: the kind of cold rage like like he when he
Speaker 1: was more really enraged in her. He'd completely ignored me,
Speaker 1: but he wasn't cold. Something I found interesting and heartbreaking
Speaker 1: in Lisa's story, and so illuminating of her internal condition,
Speaker 1: is that she pilfered things, small, inconsequential things from her
Speaker 1: father's home years later, when he was dying and she'd
Speaker 1: come to visit. She'd take tiny things of no material value,
Speaker 1: as if these things were going to bring her father
Speaker 1: close and complete her life. She'd take them on the
Speaker 1: plane home, a chipped bowl, an old pillow case, a
Speaker 1: tube of lip gloss, as if these things would fill
Speaker 1: up all the holes and cracks of whatever was missing.
Speaker 1: She had done a version of this while in high
Speaker 1: school as well. This time, after she discovers an envelope
Speaker 1: full of hundred dollar bills, she peels one off, then
Speaker 1: later another and another. She buys her sat the coat,
Speaker 1: she buys gifts for her family. It isn't about the money,
Speaker 1: It's about the feelings she can't touch or express. The
Speaker 1: hubbit all are bills. I think that was a way
Speaker 1: to access my own remorse somehow because that was the
Speaker 1: result of it. Is I walked around feeling it was
Speaker 1: almost like after I broke a glass. It was I
Speaker 1: walked around feeling ashamed and full of remorse. And I
Speaker 1: wonder if I hadn't felt somehow stolen from or ripped
Speaker 1: off by my father in some deep way and twisted
Speaker 1: it against myself, and if I wasn't trying to access
Speaker 1: those feelings of being so bad that I was worth leaving,
Speaker 1: of being so such a awful human being that I
Speaker 1: would have merited being abandoned. Because my feeling, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, it's like this is a person who's been
Speaker 1: into its therapy, but I'm just thinking, what is the
Speaker 1: results of stealing those hundreds? The result was I walked
Speaker 1: around always feeling every time I thought it would at
Speaker 1: least I would think, he's got the it's over. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna be out, he's gonna be He's going to know
Speaker 1: how bad I am. I'm going to be left. And
Speaker 1: so I wonder if in a certain way it found
Speaker 1: me to him, it bound me to our story, which
Speaker 1: did not yet feel resolved that he had left me.
Speaker 1: And why I had no answer was it because I
Speaker 1: was an ugly baby? Was it because I wasn't lovable?
Speaker 1: Was it because there was something horribly wrong with my mother?
Speaker 1: Who I am related to? All of these reasons I
Speaker 1: could come up with because I didn't know the reason
Speaker 1: and it hadn't been resolved, and I'm living with him,
Speaker 1: but it's still not resolved, So I think that's what
Speaker 1: it was about. But I think it was about keeping
Speaker 1: myself feeling bad me because I still at my core,
Speaker 1: had not reached any resolution about our history together through
Speaker 1: these years. Lisa excels academically. This a great college is
Speaker 1: going to be her ticket out and maybe also the shiny,
Speaker 1: sparkling achievement that will solve all these unsolvable problems. She
Speaker 1: has a dream of going to Harvard, a school which
Speaker 1: is not out of reach for her, no matter who
Speaker 1: her father is, And during her interview there some survival
Speaker 1: instinct kicks in and she lets the interviewer know that
Speaker 1: her father is the head of a little company called Apple.
Speaker 1: The tenor of the interview changes. The interviewer excuses herself
Speaker 1: for a moment, probably to go down the hall to
Speaker 1: the development office, and when she returns, the level of
Speaker 1: interest has risen just a bit. I really thought I
Speaker 1: was going to go to my grave with that story,
Speaker 1: because if you read that, you'll know I'm probably not
Speaker 1: you know, maybe I'm not smart enough. I I you'll
Speaker 1: know how much I was willing to kind of elbow
Speaker 1: my way into something to get something. You know, you'll know,
Speaker 1: opportunistic and selfish and sniveling whatever, you'll know all that
Speaker 1: to me, and I got like, oh god, I don't
Speaker 1: want people to read that. So it's funny, right I
Speaker 1: wrote it, and you know, it wasn't so bad. People said, oh,
Speaker 1: good scene, and I thought, oh, when I got the
Speaker 1: stories in there that needed to be in there, somehow
Speaker 1: the shame floated off of the stories for me so
Speaker 1: that I didn't really worry about how I looked anymore
Speaker 1: because I felt so much better. I love that. Thank
Speaker 1: you for that, because that I, I mean, that's sort
Speaker 1: of something that I talked about all the time and
Speaker 1: think about it on the podcast, is the way that
Speaker 1: actually voicing shame, whether you're writing a memoir about it
Speaker 1: or speaking about it, it actually has this extraordinary effect
Speaker 1: of ultimately having that shame float away. Right. It wasn't
Speaker 1: until I started to open up the shameful thing that
Speaker 1: I appeared. I became his body, So Shane was what
Speaker 1: his body? So let me ask you one last question.
Speaker 1: When your father is dying, he says to you again
Speaker 1: and again and again, he says to you, I owe
Speaker 1: you one, I owe you one. I'm just wondering what
Speaker 1: you think he meant by that, and how you sort
Speaker 1: of took that with you, that sense that he was
Speaker 1: in some way at the end of all this he
Speaker 1: was apologizing to you. It was like what I had
Speaker 1: wanted the whole time. I think it meant like, at
Speaker 1: least the way that I interpreted that was like you
Speaker 1: and I see the same truth. What is missing for you?
Speaker 1: I see, I know I did it. It is not nothing.
Speaker 1: I had felt this feeling of being kind of ripped off,
Speaker 1: meaning I didn't get to know my father when I
Speaker 1: was younger, and he wasn't there for me. He wasn't
Speaker 1: protecting me as well as he it. So I think
Speaker 1: it was an acknowledgement of a common truth which was
Speaker 1: been part of the problem. Gosh, it's amazing how powerful
Speaker 1: it is to just say that your perspective of something
Speaker 1: is similar to another person. I didn't need him to
Speaker 1: make up for it. I didn't need him to apologize forever,
Speaker 1: but just the idea of like I owe you and
Speaker 1: I know it was so wonderful. It was such a bomb.
Speaker 1: It felt like a bomb on a burn, like, oh,
Speaker 1: if we see things the same way, then I'm not
Speaker 1: crazy for all of my feelings. And I have felt
Speaker 1: like some part of him would have been very proud
Speaker 1: of me, but some part of him would have been
Speaker 1: very pissed in me writing this book, and and somehow
Speaker 1: took me some part of the narrative for me. I
Speaker 1: wrote the book about myself, but he is pulled up
Speaker 1: in that net. And so I have told myself, you
Speaker 1: owe me one. This is the one can owe me things.
Speaker 1: I get to write a book about myself and you
Speaker 1: can consider some are all of your debt as alta.
Speaker 1: I want to thank my guest Lisa Brennan Jobs for
Speaker 1: sharing her story on our show. For more on Lisa's
Speaker 1: memoir Small Fry, visit Lisa Brennan Jobs dot net. Family
Speaker 1: Secrets is an I Heeart media production. Dylan Fagan is
Speaker 1: the supervising producer. Julie Douglas and beth Ann Macaluso are
Speaker 1: the executive producers. If you have a family secret you'd
Speaker 1: like to share, get in touch with us at listener
Speaker 1: mail at Family Secrets podcast dot com. You can also
Speaker 1: find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder, Facebook at Family
Speaker 1: Secrets Pod, and Twitter at Family Secrets Pod. For more
Speaker 1: about my book Inheritance, visit Danny Shapiro dot com. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts. For my heart Radio, visit the I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your
Speaker 1: favorite shows.