vegetarian, and so was Chrisann, but she wasn’t. He was fine with that. He suggested she order
chicken, and she did.”
Eating chicken became her little indulgence as she shuttled between two parents who were
vegetarians with a spiritual regard for natural foods. “We bought our groceries—our puntarella,
quinoa, celeriac, carob-covered nuts—in yeasty-smelling stores where the women didn’t dye their
hair,” she later wrote about her time with her mother. “But we sometimes tasted foreign treats. A
few times we bought a hot, seasoned chicken from a gourmet shop with rows and rows of
chickens turning on spits, and ate it in the car from the foil-lined paper bag with our fingers.” Her
father, whose dietary fixations came in fanatic waves, was more fastidious about what he ate. She
watched him spit out a mouthful of soup one day after learning that it contained butter. After
loosening up a bit while at Apple, he was back to being a strict vegan. Even at a young age Lisa
began to realize his diet obsessions reflected a life philosophy, one in which asceticism and
minimalism could heighten subsequent sensations. “He believed that great harvests came from
arid sources, pleasure from restraint,” she noted. “He knew the equations that most people didn’t
know: Things led to their opposites.”
In a similar way, the absence and coldness of her father made his occasional moments of
warmth so much more intensely gratifying. “I didn’t live with him, but he would stop by our
house some days, a deity among us for a few tingling moments or hours,” she recalled. Lisa soon
became interesting enough that he would take walks with her. He would also go rollerblading with
her on the quiet streets of old Palo Alto, often stopping at the houses of Joanna Hoffman and Andy
Hertzfeld. The first time he brought her around to see Hoffman, he just knocked on the door and
announced, “This is Lisa.” Hoffman knew right away. “It was obvious she was his daughter,” she
told me. “Nobody has that jaw. It’s a signature jaw.” Hoffman, who suffered from not knowing
her own divorced father until she was ten, encouraged Jobs to be a better father. He followed her
advice, and later thanked her for it.
Once he took Lisa on a business trip to Tokyo, and they stayed at the sleek and businesslike
Okura Hotel. At the elegant downstairs sushi bar, Jobs ordered large trays of unagi sushi, a dish he
loved so much that he allowed the warm cooked eel to pass muster as vegetarian. The pieces were
coated with fine salt or a thin sweet sauce, and Lisa remembered later how they dissolved in her
mouth. So, too, did the distance between them. As she later wrote, “It was the first time I’d felt,
with him, so relaxed and content, over those trays of meat; the excess, the permission and warmth
after the cold salads, meant
a once inaccessible space had opened. He was less rigid with himself, even human under the
great ceilings with the little chairs, with the meat, and me.”
But it was not always sweetness and light. Jobs was as mercurial with Lisa as he was with
almost everyone, cycling between embrace and abandonment. On one visit he would be playful;
on the next he would be cold; often he was not there at all. “She was always unsure of their
relationship,” according to Hertzfeld. “I went to a birthday party of hers, and Steve was supposed
to come, and he was very, very, late. She got extremely anxious and disappointed. But when he
finally did come, she totally lit up.”
Lisa learned to be temperamental in return. Over the years their relationship would be a roller
coaster, with each of the low points elongated by their shared stubbornness. After a falling-out,
they could go for months not speaking to each other. Neither one was good at reaching out,
apologizing, or making the effort to heal, even when he was wrestling with repeated health
problems. One day in the fall of 2010 he was wistfully going through a box of old snapshots with
me, and paused over one that showed him visiting Lisa when she was young. “I probably didn’t go
over there enough,” he said. Since he had not spoken to her all that year, I asked if he might want
to reach out to her with a call or email. He looked at me blankly for a moment, then went back to
riffling through other old photographs.
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