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Jobs' high school girlfriend writing book about relationship

Mother of Steve Jobs' first daughter is writing a memoir about her rocky relationship with the Apple co-founder, including her struggle to get him to accept paternity of his child.

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Steven Musil
2 min read
The late Steve Jobs
The late Steve Jobs Apple

Steve Jobs' high school girlfriend and the mother of his daughter Lisa plans to write a book telling the story of her rocky relationship with the late Apple co-founder.

Chrisann Brennan is writing an untitled memoir for St. Martin's Press, part of Macmillan, The New York Times reported today. Brennan, now a painter living in the San Francisco Bay Area, met Jobs while the two were students at Homestead High School in Cupertino, Calif.

The pair lived together in a cabin during the summer after they graduated, traveled to India on a spiritual quest, and attended lectures together.

"At 17, Steve had more than a touch of the cool sophistication of a Beat poet," she wrote last year in an article about Jobs for Rolling Stone magazine. "It is as if Beat poetry laid the future for technology in Steve."

After returning from India, the couple had a sporadic romantic relationship, moving in together in a Los Altos, Calif., house but inhabiting separate rooms. Their relationship eventually rekindled, and Brennan became pregnant with a girl now known as Lisa Brennan-Jobs.

Jobs denied paternity and initially wanted nothing to do with the child. Brennan and Lisa moved into a dilapidated house in Menlo Park, living on welfare before persuading Jobs to take a paternity test a year after Lisa was born that proved he was the father.

In Walter Isaacson's biography, Jobs said he regretted how he handled his relationship with his first daughter.

"I wish I had handled it differently," Jobs said. "I could not see myself as a father then, so I didn't face up to it.... I tried to do the right thing. But if I could do it over, I would do a better job."

In addition to her relationship with Jobs, St. Martin's Press said, Brennan's memoir will discuss "Jobs' enormous appeal, energy, and drive as well as his developing ambition and ruthlessness in business and personal dealings."