"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.... When Lisa is in high school, she persuades Steve and Laurene to accompany her to her psychiatrist for a meeting, where she confesses: 'I’m feeling terribly alone.' Then she bursts into tears, which she hoped 'would soften them.' Laurene finally breaks the silence. 'We’re just cold people'..."

From "The Father of Personal Computing Who Was Also a Terrible Dad," Melanie Thernstrom's review of the Lisa Brennan-Jobs memoir "Small Fry."

I'm a little interested in "Small Fry," but I don't trust Thernstrom's opinion of the quality of the writing because when I read "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," I was drifting around wondering who was pinching trifles — Lisa or Steve? I assume it was Lisa and she was stealing inconsequential items, but I was distracted picturing Steve squeezing little sponge cakes. I have a feeling Thernstrom and Brennan-Jobs share a form of humorless poeticizing that leaves me, like Laurene, cold.