“You shouldn’t say that,” Lisa whispers in Eve’s ear, reeling. It is the terrible motif of her life. For the first three years after her birth, Jobs denies paternity (and later, when she is an adult, he erases her existence again, describing himself to magazines and on his company’s website as the father of only her three half siblings). Chrisann also makes her feel like a mistake, repeatedly intimating that being a single mother is too difficult for her. By kindergarten, Lisa had internalized her unwantedness and begun “to feel there was something gross and shameful about me,” as if she were “wormy inside, like I’d caught whatever disease or larvae were passed through raw eggs and flour when I snuck raw cookie dough.”

Brennan-Jobs is a deeply gifted writer. Before I read her book, I wondered if it had been ghostwritten, like many such books. But from the striking opening — in which Lisa is drifting around her father’s house when he is dying of cancer, snubbed by everyone and pinching trifles from different rooms to appease her sense of exclusion — it is clear that this is a work of uncanny intimacy. Her inner landscape is depicted in such exquisitely granular detail that it feels as if no one else could possibly have written it. Indeed, it has that defining aspect of a literary work: the stamp of a singular sensibility. In the fallen world of kiss-and-tell celebrity memoirs, this may be the most beautiful, literary and devastating one ever written.

Although Lisa felt loved by her mother, Chrisann was intermittently negligent and abusive. Suffering from depression, she would talk of suicide, spend whole days shut in her room and — by middle school — draw Lisa into hours of violent argument every night. Under pressure from Lisa’s school (which threatened to call social services, Lisa later learns), Steve agrees to take her in. She is overjoyed. As a child, she had pictured herself as a princess in disguise; finally, she imagines, legitimacy will be bestowed on her and she will take her place alongside her stepmother, Laurene, and baby brother, Reed, in their “fairy-tale,” faux-English country cottage mansion adorned by apple trees where fans cluster on the sidewalk.

But Lisa’s role turns out to be more like Cinderella’s, as neighbors — who come to play fairy godparents in her life — observe. (These neighbors take her in when her father expels her, and pay for her senior year at Harvard when he refuses.) Steve demands absolute fealty: He pressures Lisa to change her last name to his (she adds it with a hyphen) and insists that she not see her mother for six months. Lisa cries herself to sleep out of grief and guilt about abandoning Chrisann. She is made to wash the dishes by hand each night (Steve refuses to repair the broken dishwasher), to sleep in a chilly room (he also refuses to repair the heater) and to serve as an on-call babysitter for her brother. When her father and Laurene invite her to join them at a fancy wedding in Napa, she is thrilled. She pictures it as her coming-out ball, where she will “be included, in public, part of the family! The daughter, the sister.” She’ll need to buy nylons and pick out a dress, she thinks, in “an ecstasy of decision-making.” But when they get to the hotel room and she starts to change, they let her know she needn’t bother: She won’t be attending the ceremony. They have brought her to babysit for her brother.

Her father goes to great lengths to make her feel excluded when he is with Laurene. In one of the book’s most grotesque scenes, he grabs Laurene when the three of them are sitting in the garden and starts making out with her, undulating and “moaning theatrically” as he puts his hand up her skirt and Laurene opens her legs to reveal “a scythe of her white cotton underwear.” (A startling metaphor: Has underwear ever been figured as a scythe before?) When Lisa gets up to leave, he forces her to stay and watch, telling her, “we’re having a family moment” and “it’s important that you try to be part of this family.”