"Now, in the days before the book is released, [Lisa] Brennan-Jobs is fearful that it will be received as a tell-all exposé, and not the more nuanced portrait of a family she intended. She worries that the reaction will be about a famous man’s legacy rather than a young woman’s story — that
she will be erased again, this time in her own memoir.... Ms. Brennan-Jobs describes her father’s frequent use of money to confuse or frighten her... When her mother found a beautiful house and asked Mr. Jobs to buy it for her and Lisa, he agreed it was nice — but bought it for himself and moved in with his wife, Laurene Powell Jobs.... Early copies of the memoir have circulated among family and friends. [Laurene] Powell Jobs, her children and Mr. Jobs’s sister, Mona Simpson, gave this statement to The Times: 'Lisa is part of our family, so it was with sadness that we read her book, which differs dramatically from our memories of those times. The portrayal of Steve is not the husband and father we knew. Steve loved Lisa, and he regretted that he was not the father he should have been during her early childhood. It was a great comfort to Steve to have Lisa home with all of us during the last days of his life, and we are all grateful for the years we spent together as a family.'"
From
"In ‘Small Fry,’ Steve Jobs Comes Across as a Jerk. His Daughter Forgives Him. Should We?/Lisa Brennan-Jobs has written a memoir about her famous father. The details are damning, but she doesn’t want them to be" (NYT).
A fact that's easy to get confused about: Did Lisa inherit nothing from her father? Apparently, he threatened that, but (according to the NYT), Lisa got "millions — the same amount as his other children."
I'm interested in that phrase, "she will be erased again." It's Lisa's own book. She's choosing to tell the story her way, but that can't stop the people she's writing about from talking back and presenting their version of the events they too lived through. Otherwise, they are "erased."
"Erased" has been a vogue word for many years. Keep an eye on it. It's the visual equivalent of "silenced." These are sleight-of-hand words that are often used to get other people to disappear/shut up. It's the opposite of the old free-speech notion that the remedy for speech you don't like is "more speech." Those who deploy "erased" (and "silenced") this way are saying in order for me to be properly heard and respected, other people need to refrain from contradicting or challenging me.
ALSO: I need to question that headline: "In ‘Small Fry,’ Steve Jobs Comes Across as a Jerk. His Daughter Forgives Him. Should We?/Lisa Brennan-Jobs has written a memoir about her famous father. The details are damning, but she doesn’t want them to be." Brennan-Jobs wrote what she wrote. Why shouldn't we infer what she wants from what she did, which is write a memoir with "damning details" that cause he father to come across as "a jerk"?
My rule of thumb is that people do what they want to do. If they say they want something else, I'm skeptical. So I'd never write, "The details are damning, but she doesn’t want them to be." It would have to be,
The details are damning, but she says she doesn’t want us to see them that way.
To take my rule of thumb further, I would assume that she's talking to the NYT and using it to get out the message that the forthcoming book doesn't mean what she's afraid it will be understood to mean, and she's proclaiming forgiveness because she wants her book to be well-received, not undercut by her siblings and by Laurene Powell Jobs and Mona Simpson.
Simpson (Jobs's sister) is a highly respected writer, and Brennan-Jobs's expression of fear that her memoir will be regarded as not "nuanced" but just "a tell-all exposé" suggests literary aspirations that Simpson has the power to easily crush.
According to Wikipedia:
While a student at Harvard, [Brennan-Jobs] wrote for The Harvard Crimson. She graduated in 2000 and subsequently moved to Manhattan to work as a writer. She has written for The Southwest Review, The Massachusetts Review, The Harvard Advocate, Spiked, Vogue, and O, The Oprah Magazine.
That's 18 years since graduation, without much of a literary career (even with "millions" to spare her the grind of day jobs that make life hard for so many writers and with the leg-up she has always had because of her name). The book title is "Small Fry," but "small fry" are "Young or unimportant persons (collectively or in a body); a crowd of such persons" (the original metaphor being little fish appearing in large numbers) (OED).
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