“他不是冷酷无情”：乔布斯女儿回忆录中的爱与宽恕

When Steve Jobs told his daughter Lisa Brennan-Jobs that the Apple Lisa computer was not named after her, it was not a cruel lie to a little girl, she insists — he was teaching her “not to ride on his coattails.”

当史蒂夫·乔布斯(Steve Jobs)告诉他的女儿丽莎·布伦南-乔布斯(Lisa Brennan-Jobs)，苹果的“丽莎”电脑不是以她的名字命名的时，这并不是一个对小女孩撒的残酷的谎言——丽莎坚称——而是乔布斯在教她不要“利用他的声望”。

When Mr. Jobs refused to install heat in her bedroom, he was not being callous, she says — he was instilling in her a “value system.”

当乔布斯拒绝在她的卧室里安装暖气时，他并不是冷酷无情，丽莎说，而是在向她灌输一种“价值体系”。

When a dying Mr. Jobs told Ms. Brennan-Jobs that she smelled “like a toilet,” it was not a hateful snipe, she maintains — he was merely showing her “honesty.”

当乔布斯临终前告诉她，她身上的气味闻起来“像马桶”，这并不是一种恶意的攻击，丽莎坚持认为，而只不过是他在对她展示“诚实”。

It’s a strange thing to write a devastating memoir with damning details but demand that these things are not, in fact, damning at all. Yet that’s exactly what Ms. Brennan-Jobs has done in a new memoir, “Small Fry,” and in a series of interviews conducted over the last few weeks.

写一部充满谴责性细节的令人震惊的回忆录，但同时又坚称这些细节不是谴责，是一件奇怪的事情。但这正是布伦南-乔布斯在她的新回忆录《小鱼小虾》(Small Fry)、以及她在过去几周中接受的一系列采访中所做的。

Thanks to a dozen other biographies and films, Apple obsessives already know the broad outlines of Ms. Brennan-Jobs’s early life: Mr. Jobs fathered her at 23, then denied paternity despite a DNA match, and gave little in financial or emotional support even as he became a god of the early computing era. “Small Fry,” which goes on sale Sept. 4, is Ms. Brennan-Jobs’s effort to reclaim her story for herself.

由于已经有十几部其他人写的传记和电影，苹果迷们早已了解了布伦南-乔布斯早期生活的大致轮廓：乔布斯在23岁时成为丽莎的生父，但尽管有DNA亲子鉴定，乔布斯仍拒绝承认她是自己的女儿，而且就在计算机的早期时代开始把他奉为神的时候，他却几乎没有为女儿提供经济上或感情上的支持。《小鱼小虾》一书将于9月4日开始发售，布伦南-乔布斯试图在此书中重新讲述这个属于自己的故事。

The backdrop to her raw depictions of life with and without Mr. Jobs is 1980s Silicon Valley, where artists and hippies mixed with technologists, ideas of how to build the future flourished, and a cascade of trillions of dollars was just beginning to crash onto the landscape. Ms. Brennan-Jobs navigated a childhood on welfare with her mother, the artist Chrisann Brennan, and an adolescence ensconced in her father’s wealth.

她对跟乔布斯或不跟乔布斯一起生活的真实描述的大背景是20世纪80年代的硅谷。那时的硅谷，艺术家和嬉皮士与技术人员打成一片，关于如何建设未来的想法层出不穷，数万亿美元的资金开始源源不断地涌入。布伦南-乔布斯在童年时期曾靠政府福利生活，与身为艺术家的母亲克里斯安·布伦南(Chrisann Brennan)相依为命，后来在青春期靠父亲的财富过上了更加安稳的生活。

In passage after passage of “Small Fry,” Mr. Jobs is vicious to his daughter and those around her. Now, in the days before the book is released, Ms. 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.

在《小鱼小虾》一段接一段的文字里，乔布斯对他的女儿和她周围的人都很恶毒。现在，在回忆录出版前的日子里，布伦南-乔布斯担心，这本书会被当作一部和盘托出的爆料，而不是她所预期的，捕捉到一个家庭的各种细微的描绘。她担心人们的反应将是关于一个著名男人留下的东西，而不是关于一个年轻女性的故事;她担心她将再次被抹去，而这一次是在她自己的回忆录里。

On the eve of publication, what Ms. Brennan-Jobs wants readers to know is this: Steve Jobs rejected his daughter for years, but that daughter has absolved him. Triumphantly, she loves him, and she wants the book’s scenes of their roller skating and laughing together to be as viral as the scenes of him telling her she will inherit nothing.

在即将出版之前，布伦南-乔布斯想让读者知道的是：史蒂夫·乔布斯曾好多年拒绝接受自己的女儿，但这个女儿已经赦免了他的罪过。她以一种胜利的姿态爱父亲，她希望，书中她和父亲一起滑旱冰和大笑的场景，能和父亲告诉女儿她什么都不会继承的场景一样，成为人们茶余饭后谈论的东西。

Ms. Brennan-Jobs’s forgiveness is one thing. What’s tricky is that she wants the reader to forgive Mr. Jobs, too. And she knows that could be a problem.

布伦南-乔布斯的宽恕是一回事。问题在于，她希望读者也能原谅乔布斯。她知道这可能会是个问题。

“Have I failed?” she asked, in one of our conversations. “Have I failed in fully representing the dearness and the pleasure? The dearness of my father, and the outrageous pleasure of being with him when he was in good form?”

“我失败了吗?”在我们的一次谈话中，她问道。“我是不是没能充分表达宝贵与快乐?(是不是没能充分表达)我父亲的珍贵，以及当他状态好时，我和他在一起时的无比快乐?

‘The Bad Part of a Great Story’

“一个伟大故事的糟糕部分”

After college, Ms. Brennan-Jobs left the United States to work in finance in London and Italy; she later shifted into design, and then freelance writing for magazines and literary journals. Now 40, she has long avoided publicity. She has never been profiled, and she has carefully eluded most of her father’s chroniclers. (One exception: Aaron Sorkin, who called her “the heroine” of his 2015 Steve Jobs biopic.) Ms. Brennan-Jobs said she did not trust Walter Isaacson, who wrote the definitive, megaselling biography of her father in 2011.

大学毕业后，布伦南-乔布斯离开了美国，在伦敦和意大利从事金融业;后来，她转而从事设计工作，再后来为杂志和文学期刊自由撰稿。现年40岁的她一直避免抛头露面。从未有媒体对她做过人物专访，她也曾小心翼翼地避开大多数为她父亲写传记的人。(有一个例外是亚伦·索尔金[Aaron Sorkin]，他称布伦南-乔布斯是他2015年拍摄的史蒂夫·乔布斯传记片的“女主角”。)布伦南-乔布斯说，她不信任沃尔特·艾萨克森(Walter Isaacson)，艾萨克森2011年为她父亲写的权威性传记曾畅销一时。

“I never spoke with Walter, and I never read the book, but I know I came off as cold to my father and not caring whether he felt bad,” Ms. Brennan-Jobs said in late July, sitting in Cantine, a small, vegan-friendly cafe in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens neighborhood. “I was devastated by it.”

“我从未与沃尔特谈过话，也从未读过那本书，但我知道(在这本书里)我给人的印象是，对父亲冷漠，不在乎他是否感到难过，”布伦南-乔布斯说，“(那本书)让我非常难过。”她是在7月份说这番话的，当时我们正坐在布鲁克林卡罗尔花园社区(Carroll Gardens)一家名为“餐厅”(Cantine)的、对素食者友好的小咖啡馆里。

“I felt ashamed to be the bad part of a great story,” she continued. “And I felt unresolved.”

“我为自己是一个伟大故事里的一个糟糕部分而感到羞愧，”她接着说，“我曾有过问题没有解决的感觉。”

And so in “Small Fry,” she seeks to resolve some of that shame by describing how her childhood unfolded, who key characters were, why it all happened. Ms. Brennan-Jobs went back to Silicon Valley and interviewed her family, her friends, her mother’s ex-boyfriends, and her father’s ex-girlfriend. In her childhood, the region had been green with eucalyptus and full of garage hackers. Now it is the greatest wealth-creation machine in the history of the world, and Mr. Jobs remains its towering hero.

所以她寻求在《小鱼小虾》中消除一部分羞愧，手法是通过描述自己的童年如何展开、关键人物是谁，以及这一切是为什么发生的。布伦南-乔布斯回到硅谷，采访了她的家人、朋友、母亲的前男友们，以及父亲的前女友。在她的童年时代，这个地区长满了桉树，到处都是车库里创业的人。如今，硅谷是世界历史上最伟大的创造财富的机器，而乔布斯仍然是其最伟大的英雄。

Ms. Brennan-Jobs began work on what would become “Small Fry” not long after her father’s 2011 death. Years into writing, she felt rushed by her publisher, Penguin Press, and feared being “tarted up” and made to take advantage of her father’s legacy. She wanted to be with a smaller publisher who would work with her and give her more time, and switched to Grove, taking what she says was a 90 percent cut in her advance. (A spokesperson for Penguin declined to comment.)

布伦南-乔布斯在父亲于2011年去世后不久就开始了写作，这些文字后来变成了《小鱼小虾》。书写了数年后，她觉得当时的出版商企鹅出版社(Penguin Press)太急于求成了，她担心她的书会被“搞得花里胡哨的”，让她成了一个利用父亲遗产的人。她希望找一家愿意与她合作的更小的出版商，让她有更多的时间，于是她选择了格罗夫出版社(Grove Press)，并称预付稿酬因此减少了90%。(企鹅出版社的发言人拒绝置评。)

One result of the delay is that “Small Fry” is entering the public conversation at a time when, across industries, formerly disempowered or ignored women are having their say about powerful men. A memoir by Steve Jobs’s firstborn was always going to be a publishing sensation, but Ms. Brennan-Jobs has inadvertently timed hers to land when the public is even more attuned to marginalized voices — and when many are having darker thoughts about the world Mr. Jobs created with his attention-devouring devices.

这个推迟的一个结果是，《小鱼小虾》进入公众谈话发生在一个特别的时机，在各个行业，曾经不被赋予权力的、或被忽视的女性现在有了发言权，可以对有权有势的男性发表意见了。史蒂夫·乔布斯的长女写的回忆录在任何时候都会在出版界引起轰动，但布伦南-乔布斯无意中选择的出版时机正好是公众对边缘化的声音更适应的时候，同时也是许多人对乔布斯创造的世界产生了更多疑虑的时候，他创造的电子设备正在吞噬人们的全部注意力。

‘I Hope Thanksgiving’s OK’

“我希望还能好好过感恩节”

None of that, of course, was imaginable when Ms. Brennan-Jobs was born on May 17, 1978, on a commune farm in Oregon. Her parents, who had met in high school in Cupertino, Calif., were both 23. Mr. Jobs arrived days after the birth and helped name her, but refused to acknowledge that he was the father. To support her family, Ms. Brennan cleaned houses and used government assistance. Only after the government sued Mr. Jobs did he agree to pay child support.

当然，当布伦南-乔布斯于1978年5月17日出生在俄勒冈州的一个公社农场时，这一切都无法想象。她的父母当时都是23岁，他们在加州库比蒂诺(Cupertino)的一所高中认识。乔布斯在孩子出生几天后到来，帮助给她取名，但拒绝承认自己是孩子的父亲。为了养家糊口，布伦南曾给人打扫房子，还拿过政府的补贴。只是在政府起诉了乔布斯之后，他才同意支付儿童抚养费。

“Small Fry” describes how Mr. Jobs slowly took a greater interest in his daughter, taking her skating and coming over to her house for visits. Ms. Brennan-Jobs moved in with him for a time during high school, when her mother was struggling with money and her temper, but Mr. Jobs was cold and had extreme demands for what being a member of the family entailed. The neighbors next door worried about the teenage Lisa, and one night, when Mr. Jobs was out, they moved her from his house and into theirs. Against Mr. Jobs’s wishes, the neighbors paid for her to finish college. (He later paid them back.)

《小鱼小虾》描述了乔布斯怎样慢慢地对女儿的成长产生了更大的兴趣。他带女儿去溜冰，还到她家去看她。高中时，布伦南-乔布斯搬到了乔布斯家住，当时她母亲正为钱发愁，脾气很坏。但乔布斯很冷漠，对作为他家一员的所需条件有极端要求。乔布斯隔壁的邻居很担心十几岁的丽莎，一天晚上，乔布斯不在家的时候，他们把她搬出了乔布斯家，搬进了他们家。邻居还不顾乔布斯的意愿，出钱让她读完了大学。(乔布斯后来还了他们钱。)

In an interview, Ms. Brennan-Jobs spoke of “not wanting to alienate people” she loves, but acknowledged that her memoir might do just that. Aside from Mr. Jobs, all the central characters are very much alive. “I hope Thanksgiving’s O.K.,” she said.

在一次采访中，布伦南-乔布斯提到“不想疏远”自己所爱的人，但她承认，她的回忆录可能恰恰会产生这种效果。除了乔布斯，书中所有的主要人物都还百分之百地活着。“我希望还能好好过感恩节，”她说。

Her mother, Ms. Brennan, is portrayed as a free spirit who nurtured her daughter’s creativity — but could be mercurial, hot-tempered and sometimes neglectful. “It was horrendous for me to read,” Ms. Brennan said in an interview. “It was very, very hard. But she got it right.”

在布伦南-乔布斯的描述中，母亲布伦南是一个独立自主的人，她培养了女儿的创造力，但她也会情绪多变、脾气暴躁，有时甚至会对女儿漫不经心。“这本书读起来很令我震惊，”布伦南在接受采访时说，“非常、非常难读下去。但她(丽莎)都写对了。”

Mr. Jobs’s infamous venom is on frequent display in “Small Fry.” Out one night at dinner, Mr. Jobs turns to his daughter’s cousin, Sarah, who has just unknowingly offended him by ordering meat. “‘Have you ever thought about how awful your voice is?” Mr. Jobs asks Sarah. “Please stop talking in that awful voice,” he says, adding, “You should really consider what’s wrong with yourself and try to fix it.”

乔布斯臭名昭著的恶毒一面在《小鱼小虾》中频繁地被展现出来。一天晚上在外面吃饭的时候，乔布斯转向女儿的表妹萨拉(Sarah)问到，“你有没有想过你的声音多令人讨厌?”萨拉因为点了一道带肉的菜，无意中得罪了乔布斯。“请不要用那种讨厌的声音说话，”他说，还说，“你应该好好考虑自己到底出了什么问题，并试着改正过来。”

Ms. Brennan-Jobs describes her father’s frequent use of money to confuse or frighten her. “Sometimes he decided not to pay for things at the very last minute,” she writes, “walking out of restaurants without paying the bill.” 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.

布伦南-乔布斯在书中描述了她父亲经常用钱来迷惑或吓唬她。“有时，他在最后一刻决定不付钱，”她写道，“不付帐就走出餐馆。”当她的母亲看上了一幢漂亮的房子，请乔布斯为她和丽莎把房子买下来时，他同意房子不错，但却把房子给自己买了下来，和妻子劳伦·鲍威尔·乔布斯(Laurene Powell Jobs)一起搬了进去。

Ms. Brennan said that her daughter has, if anything, underplayed the chaos of her childhood. “She didn’t go into how bad it really was, if you can believe that,” she said.

布伦南说，女儿低调处理了童年生活的混乱。“她并没有详细描述那真的有多糟糕，如果你能相信的话，”布伦南说。

But “Small Fry” also contains moments of joy that capture Mr. Jobs’s spontaneity and unparalleled mind. When Ms. Brennan-Jobs goes on a school trip to Japan, he arrives unannounced and pulls her out of the program for a day. Father and daughter sit, talking about God and how he sees consciousness. “I was afraid of him and, at the same time, I felt a quaking, electric love,” she writes.

不过，《小鱼小虾》中也包含了一些欢乐的时刻，这些时刻捕捉到了乔布斯心血来潮的性格和无与伦比的头脑。当布伦南-乔布斯参加学校组织的去日本旅行时，他没打招呼就来了日本，让她离开学校组织的活动，陪着她玩了一天。父亲和女儿坐在一起，谈论上帝，谈论他认为什么是意识。“我怕他，同时，我也感到了一种撼人的、电一般的爱，”她写道。

“When I started writing,” Ms. Brennan-Jobs told me, “I didn’t think he’d be so interesting on the page, and I was almost frustrated that he pulled so much gravity.”

“当我开始写作时，”布伦南-乔布斯告诉我，“我不觉得纸面上的他会这么有趣，我对他有如此的吸引力几乎感到沮丧。”

After Ms. Brennan-Jobs moved in with Mr. Jobs as a teenager, he forbade her from seeing her mother for six months, as a way to cement her connection to his new family. At the same time, Mr. Jobs shifted from neglectful to controlling. When Ms. Brennan-Jobs was getting increasingly involved at her high school, starting an opera club and running for freshman-class president, he got upset. “This isn’t working out. You’re not succeeding as a member of this family,” Mr. Jobs says in the memoir. “You’re never around. If you want to be a part of this family, you need to put in the time.”

布伦南-乔布斯十几岁时搬到乔布斯家后，他曾禁止她在六个月的时间里与母亲见面，以巩固她与乔布斯新建的家庭的联系。与此同时，乔布斯的态度从漫不经心转向了控制。当布伦南-乔布斯越来越多地参与到她的高中生活中，创办了一个歌剧俱乐部，并竞选高一班学生会主席时，他很不高兴。“这没有解决问题。你没有成功地成为这个家庭的一员，”回忆录引用乔布斯的话写道。“如果你想成为这个家庭的一员的话，你需要投入时间。”

To appease her father, Ms. Brennan-Jobs transferred to another school that was closer to her father’s house. She persisted in becoming editor in chief of the school newspaper. Her mentor there, a journalism teacher named Esther Wojcicki, says “Small Fry” is a faithful account.

为了安抚自己的父亲，布伦南-乔布斯转到了另一所离父亲家更近的学校。她执着地要当校报的主编。她在学校时的指导老师、教授新闻的教师埃丝特·沃耶茨基(Esther Wojcicki)说，《小鱼小虾》的记述是忠实的。

“The dialogue that she had in there between her and Steve was just exactly right,” Ms. Wojcicki said. “The book is a gift to all of us.”

“书里，她和史蒂夫之间的对话完全是真实的，”沃耶茨基说，“这本书是给我们大家的一份礼物。”

Early copies of the memoir have circulated among family and friends. Ms. 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.”

这本回忆录的早期版本曾在家人和朋友间传阅。鲍威尔·乔布斯、她的孩子们，以及乔布斯的妹妹莫娜·辛普森(Mona Simpson)给时报发了一份这样的声明：“丽莎是我们家庭的一部分，所以我们怀着悲伤的心情读了她的书。这本书里的描述与我们对过去的记忆有很大的不同。对史蒂夫的描写不是我们所知道的那个丈夫和父亲。史蒂夫爱丽莎，他对在她的童年时代没有做一个他本该成为的父亲感到后悔。让史蒂夫感到非常欣慰的是，丽莎和我们一起在家陪他度过了他生命的最后几天。我们都很感激我们作为一家人一起度过的岁月。”

Set Free

感到释然

On a hot August day in Brooklyn, Ms. Brennan-Jobs and I walked to her studio, a small apartment with brick walls she painted white and a bamboo floor she painted black. While writing “Small Fry,” she told me, she covered the mirrors around her work space with paper. “I don’t like catching myself in the mirror,” she said, “because it’s like — ‘Oh, self.’”

在8月份炎热的一天，我和布伦南-乔布斯走进了她在布鲁克林的工作室，这是一个有外露砖墙的小公寓，她给墙涂上白色，把竹子地板涂上黑色。她告诉我，在写《小鱼小虾》期间，她用纸把工作空间周围的镜子挡了起来。“我不喜欢看到镜子里的我自己，”她说，“因为那，怎么说呢——‘哦，我自己。’”

Ms. Brennan-Jobs said she was nervous about how she would be described physically in a profile, and so I asked her to use her own words. “My face is uneven,” she said. “I have small eyes. I wish I had dimples, but I don’t. I think right now I look jowly.”

布伦南-乔布斯说，她对别人在专访中会如何描述她的外貌有些焦虑，所以我让她用自己的话来描述自己。“我的脸型不规则，”她说。“我的眼睛小。我希望有酒窝，但我没有。我认为此时此刻，我有点长着双下巴的样子。”

I interjected to say she had delicate features, and freckles, and was about 5 foot 2, with slightly reddish brown hair.

我插话说，她面目清秀，有雀斑，身高约5英尺2英寸(157公分)，头发是略微有点棕红色。

“My nose,” Ms. Brennan-Jobs replied, “is not particularly delicate.”

“我的鼻子并不特别清秀，”布伦南-乔布斯回答说。

She is deeply self-deprecating, saying she was horrified to be doing “a celebrity memoir.” She said she was sure The New Yorker would not review the book, and that years ago, her first meeting at Grove only occurred because Elisabeth Schmitz, the editorial director, was doing a favor for a mutual friend.

她高度自谦，称自己对写“名人回忆录”感到惊恐。她说，她确信《纽约客》不会评论她的书。而且，几年前，她得以与格鲁夫首次会面只是因为编辑部主任伊丽莎白·施米茨(Elisabeth Schmitz)在帮一位共同朋友的忙。

“My first thought on being pitched the book was, ‘I don’t do this kind of thing. I don’t know how to publish a celebrity memoir,’” said Ms. Schmitz, who has acquired literary memoirs like the naturalist Helen Macdonald’s “H is for Hawk.” But something about Ms. Brennan-Jobs’s writing made her reconsider. “From the first page,” she said, “her language is fresh, surprising, unpredictable.”

“当她向我提出写这本书的想法时，我的第一个反应是，‘我不做这种事情。我不知道怎样出版一本名人回忆录，’”施密茨说。她出版过几本文学回忆录，比如自然学家海伦·麦克唐纳(Helen Macdonald)的《鹰的第一个字母是H》(H is for Hawk)。但是，布伦南·乔布斯的写作中有些东西让她重新考虑。施密茨说，“她的语言从第一页开始就充满清新，令人惊讶，让人难以预测。”

I’ve read it, and her writing really is compelling. Ms. Brennan-Jobs takes the same linguistic knife to herself as she does to others. She writes with disgust about using anecdotes from her childhood to elicit sympathy from others, and she is ashamed to have dropped her father’s name during an interview to get into Harvard.

我读过这本书，她的写作确实有力。对人对己，布伦南-乔布斯都同样使用她刀子般的语言。她厌恶地描写自己利用童年轶事来获取别人的同情，她为自己在面试时抛出父亲的名字因而进了哈佛大学而感到羞耻。

On Aug. 1, Vanity Fair published an excerpt from “Small Fry” under the digital headline “I Have a Secret. My Father Is Steve Jobs.” A few nights later, Ms. Brennan-Jobs called me, worried. She hated the title, and on social media, readers were feasting on the more savage details of her account — especially the “toilet” comment.

8月1日，《名利场》刊发了《小鱼小虾》节选，网络版用的标题是“我有个秘密，我父亲是史蒂夫·乔布斯”。过了几天，布伦南-乔布斯忧心忡忡地给我打电话。她讨厌这个标题，在社交媒体上，读者们正津津乐道于她讲述中比较凶残的细节——尤其是“像马桶”这样的评语。

“He was telling me the truth,” Ms. Brennan-Jobs told me, adding that the rosewater perfume she wore had turned. “I wasn’t aware of it. Sometimes it’s nice of someone to tell you what you smell like.”

“他是在告诉我实话，”布伦南-乔布斯对我说，她又解释那是她用的玫瑰纯露的味道。“我之前没察觉。有人告诉你你的气味像什么，有时候是好事。”

It was another uncomfortable reminder that even though “Small Fry” is Ms. Brennan-Jobs’s story — one written in a precise, literary style — her father’s myth looms so large that she cannot control how her words are received. When choosing a narrator for the audio version, she nixed the ones who spoke his lines too harshly or without humor.

这又是一个令人不安的提醒，即使《小鱼小虾》是布伦南-乔布斯的故事，用精确的、文学化的风格写成的故事，她父亲的神话还是太强大，以至于她无法控制别人怎么理解她的描述。在选择有声书版本的朗读者时，她否掉了一些语调过于严厉或没有幽默感的候选人。

So much of Ms. Brennan-Jobs’s effort with the memoir seems to be to show how brutal Steve Jobs could be — and, in doing so, to reclaim that brutality for herself. And how she wants to reclaim it is to love it.

布伦南-乔布斯在回忆录里下的工夫，大多像是为了说明史蒂夫·乔布斯能有多无情——这样做也是为了自己对这种无情进行再利用。再利用的方式就是去爱它。

“You get your inheritance, delivered in a lump of coal or whatever in a sort of awful package,” she told me at one point. “And you have to take a lot of time to turn the awful package on its head, and it reveals something kind of glorious, and then you’re set free.”

“你得到了遗产，它裹在一大块煤里边，或是别的什么可怕的包装里边，”她有一次告诉我。“你必须花很多时间把这可怕的包装打开，里面的东西光彩夺目，那时候你就释然了。”

Inappropriate Scenes

不妥当的场景

If Ms. Brennan-Jobs was alarmed by the reaction to the toilet-water excerpt, she may be unprepared for what happens when readers encounter more disturbing material. Several times in “Small Fry,” Mr. Jobs engages in what seems like inappropriate affection in front of his daughter.

如果读者对马桶水那段摘录的反应都令布伦南-乔布斯惊慌，那当他们读到那些更令人困扰的内容时会作何感想，她恐怕还毫无防备。《小鱼小虾》里提到有好几次，乔布斯在女儿面前表达情感时有失分寸。

Ms. Brennan-Jobs describes him embracing Ms. Powell Jobs one day, “pulling her in to a kiss, moving his hand closer to her breasts,” and up her thigh, “moaning theatrically.”

布伦南-乔布斯描述他有一天抱住妻子鲍威尔-乔布斯，“把她拉过去亲吻，将手掌贴近她的乳房”，又移上她的大腿，“戏剧性地呻吟”。

When Ms. Brennan-Jobs tries to leave, her father stops her: “‘Hey Lis,’ he said. ‘Stay here. We’re having a family moment. It’s important that you try to be part of this family.’ I sat still, looking away as he moaned and undulated.”

布伦南-乔布斯想躲开，父亲叫住了她：“‘嘿，丽莎，’他说。‘待在这。这是我们的一家亲时刻。你要努力融入这个家，这很重要。’我坐着不动，他呻吟着扭来扭去，我装看不见。”

Ms. Brennan-Jobs emphasized in an interview that she never felt threatened by her father, and that to her, these scenes show he was “just awkward.”

布伦南-乔布斯在一次采访中强调，她从未觉得父亲威胁到她，对她来说，这些情景只是表明他“很笨拙”。

This kind of display was not an isolated incident, said Ms. Brennan-Jobs’ mother, who described an upsetting, sexualized conversation between Mr. Jobs and their daughter in her 2013 memoir, “A Bite in the Apple.” One evening, Ms. Brennan writes, she let Mr. Jobs babysit 9-year-old Lisa. When Ms. Brennan came home early, she found Mr. Jobs with the girl, “teasing her nonstop about her sexual aspirations,” “ridiculing her with sexual innuendos,” and “joking about bedroom antics between Lisa and this or that guy.”

布伦南-乔布斯的母亲说，这种表现不是孤例，在她2013年出版的回忆录《咬一口苹果》(A Bite in the Apple)中，她写过乔布斯和他们的女儿有一次恼人的涉性对话。一天晚上，布伦南写道，她让乔布斯照看9岁的丽莎。布伦南提前回了家，她发现乔布斯和女儿在一起，“不停地拿她的性渴望取笑她”，“用性暗示嘲笑她”，“拿丽莎和这个或那个男孩的房事逗乐。”

Ms. Brennan, in her memoir, describes feeling scared for her daughter that night, and wanting to place her body between them and get out of there. “I will be clear,” Ms. Brennan writes. “Steve was not a sexual predator of children. There was something else going on.” Still, after that night, Ms. Brennan tried to make sure there was “a chaperone” when Mr. Jobs was with his young daughter for long hours, she told me recently.

布伦南在回忆录里说，那天晚上她为女儿感到害怕，她想把他们俩隔开，想离开那里。“我想明确一点，”布伦南写道。“史蒂夫并不是性侵儿童的人。这里面存在别的问题。”不过她最近告诉我，那天晚上之后，只要乔布斯和他的小女儿长时间待在一起，布伦南都尽量确保女儿有个“陪护”。

“He was so inappropriate because he didn’t know how to do better,” Ms. Brennan said. In her book, she characterizes Mr. Jobs as “on a slide whistle between human and inhuman.”

“他太没分寸，因为他不知道怎样做更得体，”布伦南说。在书里，她形容乔布斯“在有人味和没人味之间无级变换”。

One afternoon in August, as Ms. Brennan-Jobs and I talked in her kitchen, she made a juice of dandelion greens, pineapple, turmeric and ginger roots. She eats an extremely healthy diet and knows it mirrors her father’s, which veered into esoteric California wellness trends, even as pancreatic cancer took over more of his body.

八月的一个下午，布伦南-乔布斯和我在她的厨房聊天，她用蒲公英嫩叶、菠萝、姜黄和生姜做了果汁。她的饮食极为健康，她知道这是受父亲影响，当年即使是胰腺癌已扩散到大部分身体，乔布斯仍紧跟神秘莫测的加州养生潮流。

Ms. Brennan-Jobs has a husband, Bill, a longtime Microsoft employee now launching a software start-up. He has two daughters, aged 10 and 12, and he and Ms. Brennan-Jobs have a 4-month-old son. As she drinks her juice, Bill is nearby with the children, and there’s an easygoing energy in the house.

布伦南-乔布斯有丈夫，叫比尔，在微软工作多年，现在正在办自己的软件创业公司。他有两个女儿，一个10岁、一个12岁，他和布伦南-乔布斯有个儿子，4个月大。她喝着果汁时，比尔和孩子们在一起，家里的气氛十分随和。

“I see my husband and the way he is with his daughters — responsive and alive and sensitive in ways my father would have liked to be,” Ms. Brennan-Jobs said. “My father would have loved to be a man like that, and he surrounded himself with men like that, but he couldn’t be.”

“我看到我丈夫和他与女儿相处的样子——有求必应、活泼、体贴入微，我的父亲也很想这样。”布伦南-乔布斯说。“父亲很希望做一个这样的男人，他周围也尽是这样的人，但他没做到。”

Decades after his child-support lawsuit, Mr. Jobs erased his paternity again. “Small Fry” notes that on his corporate bio on the Apple website, the detail-obsessed chief executive was listed as having three children. But of course he had four.

那场子女赡养官司过去几十年后，乔布斯又一次抹去了他的父亲名分。《小鱼小虾》里提到，苹果网站上乔布斯的公司简历中，列数了这位注重细节的首席执行官的三个孩子。但他明明有四个。

‘We’re Just Cold People’

“我们就是那种冷淡的人”

The most public torchbearer for Mr. Jobs’s character and legacy is Ms. Powell Jobs. With an inherited fortune of some $21 billion, she has engaged in philanthropy and launched the Emerson Collective, an organization that pursues liberal political activism and for-profit investments, and owns a majority stake in the Atlantic magazine.

乔布斯的形象和遗产，最公开的接棒人是鲍威尔-乔布斯。她继承了大约210亿美元的财富，投身慈善事业，并成立了艾默生集团(Emerson Collective)，该集团从事自由主义政治活动和营利性投资，还拥有《大西洋月刊》的多数股权。

Ms. Powell Jobs plays a somewhat “tonic note” in “Small Fry,” Ms. Brennan-Jobs said. Her stepmother brings her into family photos, for example, but many of the descriptions of Ms. Powell Jobs are biting.

布伦南-乔布斯说，鲍威尔-乔布斯在《小鱼小虾》中担当了“主音音符”。比如是她的继母把她拉进了全家福照片，但书中对鲍威尔-乔布斯有许多尖刻描写。

Ms. Brennan-Jobs told me that she gave Ms. Powell Jobs “the best line” in the book. It appears in a scene where Ms. Powell Jobs and Mr. Jobs go to a therapy session with a teenage Lisa. Ms. Brennan-Jobs cries and says she feels lonely and has wanted her parents to say good night to her.

布伦南-乔布斯告诉我，她把这本书里的“最佳台词”给了鲍威尔-乔布斯。那是有一次鲍威尔-乔布斯和乔布斯陪十多岁的丽莎去做心理治疗。布伦南-乔布斯哭着说她感到孤独，她希望父母能跟她说晚安。

Ms. Powell Jobs responds to the therapist: “We’re just cold people.”

鲍威尔-乔布斯对治疗师说：“我们就是那种冷淡的人。”

Toward the end of Mr. Jobs’s life, he finally apologized to his daughter. Ms. Brennan-Jobs calls it her “movie ending.” In the book, she writes that Mr. Jobs said he was sorry he had not spent more time with her, and for disappearing during her adulthood, forgetting birthdays and not returning notes or calls.

临近生命终点时，乔布斯终于向女儿道歉。布伦南-乔布斯称之为她的“电影结局”。她在书里写，乔布斯说自己没有更多地陪她，在她成年后彻底不出现，忘记她的生日，不回信不回电话，他对这一切感到抱歉。

In reply, Ms. Brennan-Jobs says she knows he was busy. Mr. Jobs answers that he acted the way he did because she had offended him. “It wasn’t because I was busy. It was because I was mad you didn’t invite me to the Harvard weekend,” he says in the book, referring to a matriculation event.

布伦南-乔布斯说，她知道他很忙。乔布斯则回答，他之所以那样做是因为她惹他生气。“不是忙。是因为哈佛那个周末你没邀请我去我生气了，”在书里他这样说，他指的是一场入学活动。

He also cries and tells her over and over again, “I owe you one” — a famously articulate communicator unable to summon the basic language of contrition.

他还哭着一遍又一遍地对她说，“我欠你个人情”——这个以条理清晰著称的演讲者，无法说出最基本的忏悔语言。

Ms. Brennan-Jobs may be experiencing a kind of author’s remorse as her book makes its way toward store shelves. But details as lethal as these — they sink into Mr. Jobs’s legend like daggers to the hilt — are more proof than any DNA test that she is her father’s daughter.

布伦南-乔布斯可能正在经历写作者那种作品即将上架时的追悔莫及。但这些要命的细节——它们就像匕首刺入乔布斯的传奇，直至刀柄——比任何DNA测试更能证明她的确是她父亲的女儿。

Ultimately, Mr. Jobs left his daughter an inheritance in the millions — the same amount as his other children — and she is not involved in the allocation of his financial legacy. If she was in charge of his billions, she says, she would give it away to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — a curious twist given her father’s epic rivalry with Apple’s archnemesis.

最终，乔布斯给他的女儿留下数以百万计的遗产——数额与他另几个子女一样，但他的财务遗产分配工作与她无关。她说如果由她来负责那两百多亿美元，她就全捐给比尔及梅琳达·盖茨基金会(Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation)——考虑到她父亲与这个苹果死对头的史诗级的对抗，那真是个神转折。

“Would it be too perverse?” she asked. “I feel like the Gates Foundation is really doing good stuff, and I think I would just hot potato it away.”

“这是不是太任性了?”她问。“我是觉得盖茨基金会真的做得很好，而且我想我会赶紧把烫手山芋丢掉。”

Ms. Brennan-Jobs said she wrote “Small Fry” in part to figure out why he withheld money from her even as his wealth ballooned, and as he spent it more freely on the children he had with Ms. Powell Jobs. She said she now sees it was about teaching her that money can corrupt.

布伦南-乔布斯说她写《小鱼小虾》，部分原因是想弄清楚为什么即使在父亲财富激增时，他仍对她捂紧口袋，而给他和鲍威尔-乔布斯的那几个孩子花钱就洒脱得多。她说她现在认为，那是在教她金钱能使人堕落。

The ethos “felt true and kind of beautiful and kind of enlightened for somebody like that,” she said. Still, the question was “why he would have taken that value system and applied it so severely to me.”

她说这种作风“对这样一个人来说感觉挺真实，有某种美好，有某种启迪。”不过，问题是“为什么他把这个价值观如此严苛地用在我身上”。

“You can have a value system and be unable to totally live it,” she added. “And you can imagine being that rich and famous and how amazing it is if you can hold on to some of your value system. He didn’t do it right. He didn’t apply it evenly. But I feel grateful for it.”

“你可以拥有一个价值观而并不能完全实现它，”她补充道。“你可以想象，在那样有钱那样有名的情况下，还能坚持你的某些价值观，有多了不起。他做得不对。他的价值观用得不公平。但我还是感激的。”

Ms. Brennan-Jobs told me she likes toying with the strange power of being a memoirist writing about trauma because the reader knows she made it out O.K. She is here in the privileged position of writing this book, after all. And as a memoirist, even a reluctant one, she gets the final word.

布伦南-乔布斯告诉我，回忆录作者写自己的旧创伤有一种奇妙的力量，她喜欢把玩这种力量，因为读者知道她已经走出来了。毕竟，写这本书，她有得天独厚的优势。作为写回忆录的人，哪怕不那么情愿，到底是她说了算。

One night toward the end of Mr. Jobs’s life — and the end of the book — he is watching “Law and Order” in bed.

在乔布斯生命尽头的一个晚上——也是在这本书的尾声——他在床上看剧集《法律与秩序》。

“‘Are you going to write about me?’” he asks her.

“你会写我吗?”他问她。

She tells him no.

她告诉他不会。

“‘Good,’ he says, and turns back to the television.”

“‘那就好，’他说，然后回头接着看电视。”