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Steve Jobs, As Remembered By His Sister Mona Simpson
By
Jen Chung
Published Oct 30, 2011
Modified Oct 30, 2011
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By
Jen Chung
Published Oct 30, 2011
Modified Oct 30, 2011
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Today, the NY Times has an op-ed by award-winning writer Mona Simpsonremembering her brother Steve Jobs. Jobs, who died earlier this month, was born two years before Simpson but their parents put him up for adoption; she was an adult when she found out who her brother was:
I grew up as an only child, with a single mother. Because we were poor and because I knew my father had emigrated from Syria, I imagined he looked like Omar Sharif. I hoped he would be rich and kind and would come into our lives (and our not yet furnished apartment) and help us. Later, after I’d met my father, I tried to believe he’d changed his number and left no forwarding address because he was an idealistic revolutionary, plotting a new world for the Arab people.
Even as a feminist, my whole life I’d been waiting for a man to love, who could love me. For decades, I’d thought that man would be my father. When I was 25, I met that man and he was my brother.
By then, I lived in New York, where I was trying to write my first novel. I had a job at a small magazine in an office the size of a closet, with three other aspiring writers. When one day a lawyer called me — me, the middle-class girl from California who hassled the boss to buy us health insurance — and said his client was rich and famous and was my long-lost brother, the young editors went wild. This was 1985 and we worked at a cutting-edge literary magazine, but I’d fallen into the plot of a Dickens novel and really, we all loved those best. The lawyer refused to tell me my brother’s name and my colleagues started a betting pool. The leading candidate: John Travolta. I secretly hoped for a literary descendant of Henry James — someone more talented than I, someone brilliant without even trying.
When I met Steve, he was a guy my age in jeans, Arab- or Jewish-looking and handsomer than Omar Sharif.
Simpson describes telling her brother that she knows nothing about computers and how she considered getting a Cromemco: "Steve told me it was a good thing I’d waited. He said he was making something that was going to be insanely beautiful."
Simpson also describes his love for his family, his failures and successes, struggles with his health, and his last words. Jobs' biographer Walter Isaacson also has a Times op-ed making the case for Jobs as a genius: "In some ways, Mr. Jobs’s ingenuity reminds me of that of Benjamin Franklin, one of my other biography subjects. Among the founders, Franklin was not the most profound thinker — that distinction goes to Jefferson or Madison or Hamilton. But he was ingenious."
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apple
genius
mona simpson
Steve Jobs
Jen Chung
Jen Chung is a former WNYC and Gothamist editor.
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