On Small Fry

When I started this project last month, I thought about how books can transport you to different worlds. The last book I read, though, didn’t open a door to a different world — instead, it opened a new door to my own world.

The book in question was Small Fry, the much-hyped memoir by Steve Jobs’ oldest daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs. While Brennan-Jobs is 13 years older than me, she grew up in the exact corner of the San Francisco Bay Area that I did, jumping between Menlo Park (my hometown) and its neighboring town, Palo Alto. Other than a few temporal differences — a mention of a store that closed before I was born, or descriptions of a hippie influence that had mostly faded by the time I arrived at the start of the nineties — our childhoods played out on the same terrain. So much of the book felt deeply familiar, from passing references to streets or restaurants to the more intangible sense of home, like Brennan-Jobs’ description of the specific smell of Northern California dirt or the sunlight that filters through the foothills.

But, of course, just because it’s the same setting doesn’t mean it’s the same plot. Small Fry details Brennan-Jobs’ turbulent childhood, as she bounced between a precarious life with her mother and an often lonely life with her famous father. The long-known aspects of her story — how Jobs initially denied he was her father and refused to offer financial or parenting support in her early years — have often served as a complicating counterweight to the dominant myth of Jobs as benevolent genius. Diving into the rest of Brennan-Jobs’ story made me think about the multitude of stories that collide in the part of the Bay Area we’ve both called home, and how they complicate the myths that surround this place.

In Small Fry, Brennan-Jobs notes that she grew up with a Jobs who was famous in tech and business circles, but hadn’t yet reached the level of hyper-fame that came with products like the iPhone; he became truly, globally famous in the years when she was away (first at college and then living and working in London) and mostly out of contact with him. That’s not so different from me and my hometown: I left for college in 2009, when Facebook had moved to Menlo Park but wasn’t yet massive, and when the aftermath of the recession was just starting to really shift attention toward Silicon Valley as a gleaming beacon of profit, a place where the future was supposedly being created by a new kind of “make the world a better place” capitalist. In the nine years since then, each time I’ve visited home it’s required a bit more squinting to see the place where Brennan-Jobs and I both grew up: a place where some of the nerdy dads at your softball game talked software and venture capital and startups, but not everyone did; a place where you ran around in mud and had to use qualifying phrases like “Oh, it’s about half an hour south of San Francisco” to explain where you were from.

It frustrates me now when I say where I’m from and someone immediately says, “Oh, like the Facebook headquarters!” or when the phrase “Sand Hill Road,” which growing up existed to me as a name on a freeway exit sign, the signal that we were close to home, appears in an article as a stand-in for the entire venture capital industry. I live on the East Coast right now, and based on the reactions I get, I might as well be saying “I come from techworld” when I say where I’m from. It’s a flattening, the reduction of a place to one dominant story. But, of course, what I just said about my childhood, with its nerdy dads and open, muddy spaces, is a flattening too: it leaves out a story of redlining that shaped the lives of my classmates in East Palo Alto, right next door to Menlo Park; it leaves out a story of the Ohlone, who figured out how to thrive in the foothills and mud long before Spanish missionaries showed up; it even leaves out how maybe some of those kids running around in the mud centuries later, like Brennan-Jobs, were in pain as their fathers built technologies that would change the world. It leaves out a thousand more things that I don’t know about.

Since the 2016 election, there’s been a more earnest attempt to undo some of this flattening when it comes to stories about my hometown tech industry. Maybe these tech companies aren’t actually just about making the world a better place; maybe they’ve made the world a worse place in some ways. Maybe these companies and their products aren’t leveling the playing field but doing exactly the opposite, whether they realize it or not. Maybe that recession-proof Bay Area bubble of VC returns and skyrocketing property values had a real human cost. Maybe there’s a more complicated story around how that company was founded, or what that famous CEO is like.

Reading Small Fry was like an exercise in scratching the surface of a myth, letting something much messier out. Both in the book and in interviews surrounding the book’s release, it’s clear that Brennan-Jobs’ feelings about this messier reality are unresolved: there are pieces of myth that still hold up, others that collapse, others that she’s not sure about. That might not make for a snappy narrative, but it’s deeply compelling in its own way. It reflects how I think about my hometown, and the industry that now defines it in other people’s minds: I don’t have just one narrative thread, but a whole mess of interwoven strands, some of which run in different directions.

Meanwhile, from 9 to 5 I work in communications; my whole job is about crafting narratives. What’s more, I work in what you might call the “innovation economy,” telling stories about how the future gets made. Small Fry was a reminder that it matters how we tell these stories, and how much mess we allow in. Just this week, I had a meeting about an exhibit I’m working on, which will highlight stories of innovation across a particular place’s history, and found myself thinking about Small Fry. The unresolved, the complicated, the messy: that’s what I’m hoping there might be room for in this exhibit. As I work on this project, I’ll be trying to look beyond the famous individual or tidy narrative, digging into archives and seeking out conversations to learn more about the processes and people who were part of the story. As I think about how I want to use my responsibility as a narrative-crafter, in projects like this as well as the countless smaller acts of storytelling that make up my daily activity, Small Fry is a helpful reminder: even in the contexts you think you know well, there’s always so much more to uncover.