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This week I profiled Lisa Brennan-Jobs, Steve Jobs’s first child, whose memoir “Small Fry” comes out this fall. She is the one whose paternity he denied until the government sued him for child support, the one whose tuition fees he stopped paying after she offended him, the one whose mother lived on welfare even as her father’s wealth grew. The story is a rare look inside a Silicon Valley family and a childhood right before staggering amounts of money flooded into the region.

In the book, she reckons with her place in the Jobs narrative, which has been the great narrative of Silicon Valley. And she wants to rewrite it.

Instead of the victim, Ms. Brennan-Jobs wants to show how she is stronger for the deprivation she experienced and that her father was trying, albeit clumsily, to teach her greater values. According to Ms. Brennan-Jobs, her father, the towering archetype of the tech founder, was trying to instill in her a tougher character, and she forgives him. As she lays out the details of his cruelty to make this argument, the question for readers is: Can we forgive him, too?

One scene I couldn’t include in the profile because of space is when she decided to call him “dad.” She was 28 years old. She told me she thought it bothered him that she kept calling him Steve, and she liked being able to twist that a bit. But one day she decided she wanted to be able to call someone dad. She asked him, and he said yes. No one else in her family commented on the change.