By Amrutha Gayathri: Subscribe to Amrutha's RSS feed
October 6, 2011 11:50 PM EDT
Steve Jobs' biological sister Mona Simpson, who wrote "Anywhere But Here" and "The Lost Father," fictionalized her brother as a barely disguised character in the novel "A Regular Guy."
The novel which opens with the sentence, "He was a man too busy to flush toilets," portrays the life of an "obsessive narcissist" genius named Thomas Rudolf Owens.
Simpson's protagonist is judgmental and thinks of himself as "a guy in jeans, barefoot in the boardroom." He gets thrown out of his company by people he brought in. He gives houses to his ex-girlfriends in exchange for signed nondisclosure agreements, a Fortune review of the 1996 novel noted.
Owens has a daughter he first disowns and then embraces (she could have been fathered, he says, "by 3 percent of the world's population"). Jobs had denied paternity of his first daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, from his relationship with Bay Area painter Chrisann Brennan, by claiming he was sterile; he later acknowledged Lisa as his daughter.
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Owens is "surprisingly slow to get a joke"; and he lives a life "cluttered with luck." But he's brilliant and charismatic and deeply loyal to the people he cares about.
Jobs, adopted days after birth, refused to meet his biological father, Abdulfattah "John" Jandali, but shared a relationship with sister Simpson. She first met Jobs when they were adults, after she invited him to a party promoting her novel "Anywhere But Here," where she revealed that they were siblings; Jobs was 27. He regularly visited her in Manhattan, a New York Times report said.
Jandali, a political science student from Homs, Syria, and Joanne Carole Schieble, an American graduate student, were unmarried when Jobs was born in 1955. The baby was given up for adoption and brought up by Paul and Clara Jobs of Mountain View, Calif., who named him Steven Paul.
But Jandali and Joanne married 10 months after giving up Jobs and had daughter Mona. The marriage was short-lived and Jandali and Joanne were separated in 1962. Joanne remarried, and Mona later took her stepfather's surname, Simpson.
It is no coincidence that Mona Simpson shares her name with a character in the popular television show "The Simpsons." Her ex-husband Richard Appel is a writer for "The Simpsons," who used his wife's name for Homer Simpson's mother, beginning with the episode "Mother Simpson."
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