Lisa: Yeah, and I was worried that it was based on an old font but that perhaps it hadn’t yet stood the test of time and it might not have the same refinement. I worried about this Hera a lot actually.Ĭraig: Because you thought it was cut of a too contemporary cloth? Lisa: Already I was dealing with a major, major exposure of myself in the work, and so I was hoping there would be something about the cover that would be unassailably fine, ordinary, normal, or something like that.

It’s a new font, and I was actually worried about it because it’s not very chic in a certain way. I think you’re using Hera Big on the cover there? It’s got all these qualities of what I think make beautiful covers, beautiful kerning, wonderful typography. Lisa: That’s high praise coming from you.Ĭraig: It really is. Lisa Brennan-Jobs: Thank you so much for having me.Ĭraig: Let’s just start on the outside of the book and work our way around it before going into it. Here’s today’s episode.Ĭraig: Good morning, Lisa. Lisa and I dive into how the cover and design of the book came to be, how she ended up choosing her publisher, and what the writing and publishing process felt like. It also turns out that the book has a killer cover. It just so happens that Lisa’s dad was Steve Jobs, so there’s this added surrealist element to her exploration. Small Fry digs into these sorts of thorny issues.

There’s a tenuousness to life when blood doesn’t explicitly bind you to anyone. Personally as an adopted person, I’ve spent my whole life grappling with where and how those lines of family are drawn and how they can shift unexpectedly beneath your feet, sometimes in truly tragic ways. It’s a beautiful, delicate portrait of the struggle one sometimes has with the fuzziness of family, especially the fuzziness around blood, who’s in or out, who is true family or false family.Įven though the book is mainly about the self-actualization of a young girl, it resonated with me at a very fundamental level. Today I’m talking with Lisa Brennan-Jobs, the author of The New York Times bestselling memoir, Small Fry. 'The Subtle Genius of Elena Ferrante’s Bad Book Covers'Ĭraig Mod: You’re listening to On Margins.

Small Fry by Lisa Brennan-Jobs