The Father of Personal Computing Who Was Also a Terrible Dad

The Father of Personal Computing Who Was Also a Terrible Dad

Steve Jobs may have been a "Great Man", but he doesn't seem to have been a good man. "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."