The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs by Chrisann Brennan

parentage: “My parents are the ones who raised me, not the person who gave birth to me. She gave me away. She doesn’t deserve to be called my mother .” This refrain seemed to me to acknowledge not just the fact that the Jobses were the ones who did all the work, but Steve’s bitter sense of loss and what I imagine were years of Paul Jobs spitting tacks about it and everything else he felt powerless to control.
    Back then Steve was so empathic that I think he overidentified with his father and wanted to shore up his insecurities. And so, at the tender age of seventeen, he took things into his own hands. He made the decision to drop out of his degree program and audit courses instead. It was a funny hybrid of his own desire to learn exactly what he pleased without it breaking his parents’ bank account, and complying with his birth mother’s requirement. I never heard him regret it. Not once. And there were plenty of times he might have, because the next few years were rough.
    That his parents allowed for the change is revealing, too. Here was one of the smartest students at a high school known for extremely bright kids, so advanced that he met once a week with a handful of students chosen from a pool of thousands for an elite math class. It seems to me that a child of his intelligence should have been cultivated, but that would not have been the Jobses’ context. Once he had made the decision to stop matriculating at Reed, as young as he was, he had in some way become his own man. He wouldn’t have given his parents any say in the matter and that, ironically, was consistent with the Jobses’ worldview. That would have calmed Paul down and made Steve look good to him.
    Steve acted happy about the change and his fledgling confidence grew as he embraced his Grand Experiment. I could feel his slightly overloaded enthusiasm to fake it until he could make it . Steve was inventive, for sure, and he was great at finding alternative ways of doing things, like using other people’s unused meal tickets and sleeping on couches and on dorm room floors in his sleeping bag. Steve liked being a vagabond in the tradition of Woody Guthrie. He fully enjoyed the experience of being homeless and free with the wind at his back. Steve was an experimental romantic at heart, and may very well have had his eye on the rugged beauty of that former time. I think this was what he meant when he told my father that he wanted to grow up to be “a bum,” and to me it suggests a Henry V blueprint of the foolish days of the young prince before he ascends to the throne.
    Steve went back and forth between the Bay Area and Oregon a lot over the next year. I’d drive him to an on-ramp entrance of a freeway so he could hitchhike. And driving away from those drop-offs sort of broke my heart because with his shoulders up around his ears and his black hair ruffled and flying in the chill wind he looked like a cold and lonely raven, like a bird on a wire. I remember him smiling and waving good-bye, determined to make the best of it. It still gets to me.
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    Everything that happened for him at that point was a complete surprise to me. Steve audited Shakespeare, poetry, dance, and calligraphy. I was baffled he didn’t take more science and math, because that’s what he was good at and what Reed was known for. It’s remarkable to me that he followed his instinct to develop himself through the arts. He must have told me twenty times that he loved his dance class. “I’m not very good,” he’d say, shaking his head at his willingness to be seen like that, “but I love it, I just love it!” He couldn’t stop repeating himself. He loved all his audited classes, but … dance ? I tried to imagine him in a leotard, but I couldn’t quite see it. Steve had been a competitive swimmer in high school and until he went to India, he had a beautiful swimmer’s body with a muscular upper body and arms. But he could also be awkward and clumsy in