The troubled relationship between Steve Jobs and his daughter Lisa has been recounted before. Next month, though, Lisa Brennan-Jobs’ memoir ‘Small Fry’ will be released. The book is a first-person account of her childhood and the period leading up to Steve Jobs’ death in 2011. The Vanity Fair excerpt includes anecdotes of visits by Steve Jobs to Brennan-Jobs when she was a child:

We skated the neighborhood streets. Trees overhead made patterns of the light. Fuchsia dangled from bushes in yards, stamens below a bell of petals, like women in ball gowns with purple shoes. My father and mother had the same skates, a beige nubuck body with red laces crisscrossed over a double line of metal fasts. As we passed bushes in other people’s yards, he pulled clumps of leaves off the stems, then dropped the fragments as we skated, making a line of ripped leaves behind us on the pavement like Hansel and Gretel. A few times, I felt his eyes on me; when I looked up, he looked away.

Later Brennan-Jobs sums up her relationship with her father:

I see now that we were at cross-purposes. For him, I was a blot on a spectacular ascent, as our story did not fit with the narrative of greatness and virtue he might have wanted for himself. My existence ruined his streak. For me, it was the opposite: the closer I was to him, the less I would feel ashamed; he was part of the world, and he would accelerate me into the light.

The entire excerpt is well worth reading because it provides a perspective on Jobs and his relationships with family that isn’t discussed often.

Steve Jobs didn’t grant many interviews after his return to Apple in 1997. However, he did make several appearances at the D: All Things Digital conference from 2003 to 2010 that was hosted by Wall Street Journal reporters Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. On the fifth anniversary of Jobs’ death, Recode, which was co-founded by Mossberg and Swisher, has complied a selection of the most memorable moments from those interviews into a short video.

The full interviews are available as a podcast in iTunes.

Steven Levy, writing at BackChannel on the upcoming Becoming Steve Jobs:

Though I have even less reason than Schlender to claim that ours was anything but a professional relationship, I believe I did get to see Steve as the man in full described in Becoming Steve Jobs. Though as with Schlender, Jobs and I had differences due to the diverging agendas of reporter and subject, we saw eye to eye on many things, including the amazing transformation that technology had on society, the importance of clear, simple design, and the greatness of Bob Dylan. And I am very thankful that, unlike Schlender (whose baffling refusal to see Jobs one last time seems to be tied to unique circumstances regarding not just journalism, but the writer’s health issues), I was able to properly say goodbye to Jobs in the last year of his life. Taking all this into account, I believe that Schlender and Tetzeli have indeed captured elements of Steve Jobs not found in the official biography.

Speaking with Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit, Ive detailed his creative process and work ethic.

It’s rare to see Apple’s Jony Ive on stage, so don’t miss the following video on the lessons he learned from Steve Jobs.

Let me be clear. Steve was not some mercurial ogre or cartoon autocrat. He was just very, very busy. He didn’t have time for “yes men,” the easily frightened, or those who didn’t know what the fuck they were doing or talking about.

In that way, he wasn’t different from any other executive. At least those with good sense.

Steve expected excellence. Which is why he so often got it.

Fantastic collection of stories about Steve Jobs and working at Apple by Don Melton (an extended, unified version of what first appeared on The Loop Magazine).

If you read one thing today, make it this one.