Five of the best books from the children of celebrities

Charley Burlock is the Associate Books Editor at Oprah Daily where she writes, edits, and assigns stories on all things literary. She holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from NYU, where she also taught undergraduate creative writing. Her work has been featured in the Atlantic, the Los Angeles Review, Agni, and on the Apple News Today podcast. She is currently completing an MFA in creative nonfiction at NYU and working on a book about the intersection of grief, landscape, and urban design.

At Oprah Daily Burlock tagged five "books that make us see our celebrity heroes—and their gilded lives—from a totally new perspective." One title on the list:

Small Fry by Lisa Brennan-Jobs

In 1985, Steve Jobs was one of the richest people in America, living in a sprawling 30-room mansion and frequently appearing beneath headlines and on magazine covers. Meanwhile, his only child was moving—thirteen times in the first seven years of her life— between illegal sublets and inconsistently furnished spare bedrooms, surviving off of her single mother’s ingenuity and her father’s meager court-mandated child support checks. Although Jobs denied his paternity for many years, telling Time magazine when Lisa was four that “Twenty-eight percent of the male population of the United States could be the father” (against the findings of a DNA test and a legal case), he eventually the two grew closer later in her childhood, with Lisa living with her father on-and-off and eventually taking his surname. But for Steve Jobs, love, like success, could only be chased, never caught. While the circumstances of Lisa’s childhood would have easily justified a scathing tell-all takedown, this book is not that. Infinitely wise, intensely curious, and exquisitely written, Small Fry is a nuanced portrait or both a man and an era, the legacies of which we are all still reckoning with.

Read about another entry on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue