The New Yorker Radio Hour

Episode: “Lisa Brennan-Jobs on the Shadow of Steve Jobs, and Jill Lepore on the Long Sweep of American History”

Date: September 21, 2018
Host: David Remnick

Episode Overview

In this episode, David Remnick explores two deeply personal and resonant stories:

• First, he speaks with Lisa Brennan-Jobs about her memoir, Small Fry, which recounts her complicated relationship with her father, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and her mother, Chrisann Brennan. The conversation delves into family, memory, and the burden of legacy.
• Later, Remnick interviews Harvard historian and New Yorker contributor Jill Lepore. They cover Lepore’s monumental new book, These Truths: A History of the United States, discussing how power, protest, and the struggle over who counts as American have shaped the nation.

Part 1: Lisa Brennan-Jobs on Family, Absence, and Memoir

Theme:

The emotional, psychological, and practical ramifications of growing up as the child of a famous—and largely absent—parent.

Key Discussion Points and Insights

• Opening with Theft and Agency (01:15):
  Lisa Brennan-Jobs reads from her memoir’s opening, describing how she began “to steal things from [her] father's house” shortly before his death—a metaphor for grasping for pieces of him, agency, and perhaps narrative control.

  “After stealing each item, I felt sated. I promised myself this would be the last time. But soon the urge to take something else would arrive again, like thirst.” — Lisa Brennan-Jobs (01:15)

• Why This Story, and Why Now?
  Brennan-Jobs explains her initial resistance to writing about her father’s legacy; she wished her “first book had been about something, anything else” (00:09), wanting her story to be her own, not overshadowed by Steve Jobs.

  “Am I allowed to write my own story when I have such a famous father?” — Lisa Brennan-Jobs (01:59)

• Eviction and Displacement
  Brennan-Jobs moved 13 times before the age of seven (03:00). She and her mother lived near poverty, even while Jobs amassed wealth and fame.

• On Being Forced to Write the Memoir
  The story demanded to be told before she could move on: “There’s a story maybe that has to come out first that then opens the way for other stories.... I was hoping my father would be incredibly dull on the page.” — Lisa Brennan-Jobs (03:53)

• Struggles with Depiction and Public Ownership of Steve Jobs
  Brennan-Jobs discusses reconciling her private pain with the public’s image:

  “Maybe another way to put it is that everyone's complex family is unique. No matter who it is.” — Lisa Brennan-Jobs (12:39)

• Cruelty, Rejection, and Limited Support
  Remnick notes periods of “real cruelty,” with Jobs denying paternity and providing little support. Brennan-Jobs frames this as emotional unreadiness rather than pure financial neglect:

  “I don't think it was a money question… he wasn't ready to be a father. My parents were both very young when I was born.” (07:05) “It was so close, the way often only children and their parents are, and then made closer by the fact that we didn't have money.” (06:19)

• Reconciliation and the “Hollywood Moment” (10:07)
  Brennan-Jobs recounts Jobs’s tearful apologies on his deathbed, his cryptic “I owe you one,” and the strange catharsis that came too late.

  “If we could do it again, then maybe next time we could be friends... But also I meant not your daughter, please, next time.” — Lisa Brennan-Jobs (10:23)

• Inheritance, Fame, and Universality
  When Remnick asks about her inheritance (implied: emotionally), Brennan-Jobs worries about being asked about money but affirms that the legacy is far more complex. She stresses that the longing for connection is universal, not unique to children of the famous.

  “Isn't there sometimes a longing for people who are even around? Isn't there sometimes a multiplicity of feelings for people you love?” — Lisa Brennan-Jobs (11:59)

Memorable Quotes & Moments

• “It's like the fantasy of control.” — Lisa Brennan-Jobs on writing memoir and processing trauma (05:04)
• “There are moments of joy, tenderness, sweetness, care in this book between the two of us that are nowhere else.” — Lisa Brennan-Jobs on showing a fuller spectrum of her relationship with Jobs (09:15)

Part 2: Jill Lepore on the Sweep of American History

Theme:

What does it mean to tell—honestly and comprehensively—the story of America? Who counts, and how do we handle the nation’s contradictions and traumas?

Key Discussion Points and Insights

• Ambition of ‘These Truths’ (14:46)
  Lepore has written a single-volume history spanning 1492 to the present, driven partly by her publisher’s challenge and a historian’s sense of responsibility:

  “I wish there was a book like that. And I decided someone should try.” — Jill Lepore (15:06)

• Foundation on Violence and Powerlessness
  Lepore squarely faces America’s founding atrocities: colonization, slavery, displacement of Native Americans.

  “It is actually the assassination of worlds. It is that slaughter, those atrocities, that enslavement, that profound loss and suffering that is a crucible of violence that makes possible the ideas on which this nation is founded...” — Jill Lepore (15:51) “These ideas are actually made possible by the protests made by the powerless during that world of violence.” — Jill Lepore (16:17)

• Immigration in American History
  Discussing present-day debates, Lepore notes that most of American history upheld open borders, and restrictionists have a tenuous legacy:

  “Open borders are the most scandalous thing in American history. No, they're not. They're actually the founding ideal.” — Jill Lepore (18:58)

• Forgotten Moral Crusaders: Mary E. Lease (19:11)
  Lepore profiles Mary Lease, a 19th-century populist, suffragist, and later, a controversial white supremacist—showing how moral crusades shaped U.S. politics and how their legacies are ambiguous.

  “She comes out of that crusade... and then it turns into prohibitionism. By now, the moral crusade is just a great big giant wrench in the American political campaign toolbox.” — Jill Lepore (21:41)

• The Free Press and Early America
  Lepore, an expert in communication history, notes that American democracy presupposed an informed citizenry, making a free press uniquely important and contentious from the start.

  “They need to have some way to receive ideas other than just the educated gentlemen writing letters to one another.” — Jill Lepore (23:17)

• Presidents and the Press
  Remnick asks if vilifying the media is new; Lepore says antagonism is old, but so is belief in rigorous debate:

  “It's not that [Jefferson] thought that the press was to be believed all the time, but he knew it was essential.” — Jill Lepore (23:58)

• Comparing Today’s Turbulence to the Past (25:01)
  Asked if the national mood has ever been more anxious, Lepore responds with the historian’s long view:

  “There is no day before the Emancipation Proclamation that isn't worse than today... But if we want to think about the past as all of our pasts, then I think we need to have some sense of proportion.” — Jill Lepore (25:01)

• Progress: Myth or Reality?
  The narrative of relentless progress is, Lepore argues, more ideological than true:

  “I guess I think that notion of the forward progression itself is the illusion... I don't actually think it represents the real patterns to be discerned in American past.” — Jill Lepore (27:08)

Memorable Quotes & Moments

• “I give a lot of causal weight to slave insurrection, runaways, enslaved people who run away, wives and servants who flee, to apprentices who run away, to native peoples who wage wars or in other ways resist the taking of their lands.” — Jill Lepore (16:10)
• “For most of American history, open borders are the ideal—restriction is the exception, not the rule.” (paraphrased from 18:58)
• “There is no day before the Emancipation Proclamation that isn't worse than today. Not a single day in all of those centuries.” — Jill Lepore (25:01)

Timestamps for Key Segments

• Lisa Brennan-Jobs on Memoir and Agency — 01:15 to 12:45
• Jill Lepore on American History — 14:46 to 28:09

Final Thoughts

This episode powerfully juxtaposes the personal and the collective: Brennan-Jobs’s search for selfhood against the gravitational pull of a public legacy, and Lepore’s insistence that national myths must account for both triumph and trauma. Both interviews emphasize complexity—of family, memory, nationhood, and public narratives—inviting listeners to consider the hidden facets behind the familiar stories we think we know.