Steve Jobs died one year ago today, but the world still yearns to know more about the life of the Apple mastermind. Chrisann Brennan, Steve Jobs' high school girlfriend and the mother of his daughter Lisa, is planning on giving the world that intimate look.
Brennan is set to write a memoir, in which she will tell the story of her relationship with Jobs, The New York Times reports. The untitled memoir will be published next year by St. Martin’s Press, part of Macmillan.
Brennan, now a painter living in the San Francisco Bay Area, met Jobs in 1972 when he was a senior at Homestead High School in Cupertino, Calif. The Jobs she knew was into meditation and poetry. "At 17, Steve had more than a touch of the cool sophistication of a Beat poet," she wrote in an issue of Rolling Stone after Jobs' death. "It is as if Beat poetry laid the future for technology in Steve."
The couple lived in a cabin together one summer and got paid to portray "Alice" characters at a mall in Santa Clara, the Denver Post reports.
At the time, Jobs was “was almost 100 percent romantic," Brennan described in Rolling Stone. “He would tell me we were part of an affiliation of poets and visionaries he called `the wheat field group’ and say we were looking out a window together, with the others, watching the whole world. I did not know what he was talking about, but with all my heart I wanted to see such views.” Later, she says, he became “the all-too-often despotic jerk Steve turned into as he rose to meet the world.”
The turning point surely came when Brennan got pregnant with their daughter when she was in her '20s. She gave birth to Lisa Brennan-Jobs in 1978.
Jobs was 23 when his daughter was born. The event took an emotional toll on Jobs since he himself had been born to a 23-year-old unwed couple from the University of Wisconsin. Jobs was later adopted by Clara and Paul Jobs.
For two years after Lisa's birth, Jobs denied being the girl's father and Brennan went on welfare, according to CNN. Jobs even swore in a court document that he could not have fathered Lisa because he was "sterile and infertile, and as a result thereof, did not have the physical capacity to procreate a child."
Lisa Brennan-Jobs went on to Harvard and is now a writer.
Jobs went on to marry Laurene Powell, a Stanford business school student, with whom he had three children.