Jobs’s ups and downs with Lisa continued after she moved to Manhattan as a freelance writer. Their problems were exacerbated because of Jobs’s frustrations with Chrisann. He had bought a $700,000 house for Chrisann to use and put it in Lisa’s name, but Chrisann convinced her to sign it over and then sold it, using the money to travel with a spiritual advisor and to live in Paris. Once the money ran out, she returned to San Francisco and became an artist creating “light paintings” and Buddhist mandalas. “I am a ‘Connector’ and a visionary contributor to the future of evolving humanity and the ascended Earth,” she said on her website (which Hertzfeld maintained for her). “I experience the forms, color, and sound frequencies of sacred vibration as I create and live with the paintings.” When Chrisann needed money for a bad sinus infection and dental problem, Jobs refused to give it to her, causing Lisa again to not speak to him for a few years. And thus the pattern would continue.

在丽萨搬到曼哈顿成为自由作家之后，乔布斯跟她的关系继续起伏不定。他们的问题随着乔布斯对克里斯安的不满而愈加恶他给她买了一座价值70万美元的房子，记在了丽萨名下。但是克里斯安说服丽萨签字转到自己名下，然后把房子卖了，用这钱跟一个精神导师出去旅行，并在巴黎生活了一阵子。钱花完以后，她回到旧金山，成为一个艺术家，创作“光绘”（LightPainting）和佛教曼荼罗。“我是个‘通灵者’，我对进化的人性和升华的地球的未来作出富有远见的贡献，”她在她的网站上说（赫茨菲尔德帮她维护这个网站），“当我创作这些画并和它们共处时，我体验着神圣微振的形状、颜色和音频。”有一次她需要钱治疗严重的鼻窦感染，乔布斯拒绝支付费用，这又导致丽萨好几年没跟他说话。这种情况还会不断重演。

Mona Simpson used all of this, plus her imagination, as a springboard for her third novel, A Regular Guy, published in 1996. The book’s title character is based on Jobs, and to some extent it adheres to reality: It depicts Jobs’s quiet generosity to, and purchase of a special car for, a brilliant friend who had degenerative bone disease, and it accurately describes many unflattering aspects of his relationship with Lisa, including his original denial of paternity. But other parts are purely fiction; Chrisann had taught Lisa at a very early age how to drive, for example, but the book’s scene of “Jane” driving a truck across the mountains alone at age five to find her father of course never happened. In addition, there are little details in the novel that, in journalist parlance, are too good to check, such as the head-snapping description of the character based on Jobs in the very first sentence: “He was a man too busy to flush toilets.”

莫娜·辛普森把所有这些，加上她的想象，作为了她第三部小说《凡人》的蓝本。该小说于1996年出版。这本书的主角是以乔布斯为原型，在一定程度上符合事实：它描写了乔布斯对一位骨病不断恶化的朋友的低调慷慨，如何为对方购买一辆特制的汽车；它准确地描述了他和丽萨之间关系的诸多方面，包括他最初否认他们的血缘关系。但其他部分多为虚构：例如，虽然克里斯安在丽萨很小的时候就教她开车，但是书里的“简”5岁时开着辆卡车翻山越岭去找她父亲的情节当然是从未发生过。另外，小说里还有些小细节，用新闻学术语来说，是过于精致，无据可考，例如全书第一句就当头一棒地如此描写基于乔布斯的这个角色：“他是个忙得连马桶都不冲的人。”

On the surface, the novel’s fictional portrayal of Jobs seems harsh. Simpson describes her main character as unable “to see any need to pander to the wishes or whims of other people.” His hygiene is also as dubious as that of the real Jobs. “He didn’t believe in deodorant and often professed that with a proper diet and the peppermint castile soap, you would neither perspire nor smell.” But the novel is lyrical and intricate on many levels, and by the end there is a fuller picture of a man who loses control of the great company he had founded and learns to appreciate the daughter he had abandoned. The final scene is of him dancing with his daughter.

表面上，这部小说对乔布斯的虚构描述看起来很苛刻。辛普森描述她的主角，“不觉得有任何必要迁就其他人的希望或梦想”。他的卫生习惯也跟乔布斯本人一样不靠谱。“他不信任香体剂，经常说只要饮食习惯正确，用薄荷橄榄油皂，你既不会出汗也不会有体臭。”但是这部小说在很多层面上的描写都是很抒情和微妙的，看到结尾，这个人的形象就更加饱满了。他失去了对他创建的这家伟大公司的控制权，他尝试着欣赏他曾遗弃的私生女。最后一个场景，是他和女儿一起跳舞。

Jobs later said that he never read the novel. “I heard it was about me,” he told me, “and if it was about me, I would have gotten really pissed off, and I didn’t want to get pissed at my sister, so I didn’t read it.” However, he told the New York Times a few months after the book appeared that he had read it and saw the reflections of himself in the main character. “About 25% of it is totally me, right down to the mannerisms,” he told the reporter, Steve Lohr. “And I’m certainly not telling you which 25%.” His wife said that, in fact, Jobs glanced at the book and asked her to read it for him to see what he should make of it.

乔布斯后来说，他从未读过这本小说。“我听说是关于我的，”他告诉我，“如果它是关于我的，我真的会很愤怒，可是我不想对我妹妹发怒，所以我没读。”但是，这本书面世几个月后，他告诉《纽约时报》他读了这本书，并在主角身上看到了自己的影子。“这个角色的25%左右完全是我，直指我那些怪癖，”他对记者史蒂夫·洛尔（SteveLohr）说，“当然我不会告诉你是哪25%。”他妻子说，实际上乔布斯只瞟了这本书一眼，然后让她替他读，看看他应该如何理解。

Simpson sent the manuscript to Lisa before it was published, but at first she didn’t read more than the opening. “In the first few pages, I was confronted with my family, my anecdotes, my things, my thoughts, myself in the character Jane,” she noted. “And sandwiched between the truths was invention—lies to me, made more evident because of their dangerous proximity to the truth.” Lisa was wounded, and she wrote a piece for the Harvard Advocate explaining why. Her first draft was very bitter, then she toned it down a bit before she published it. She felt violated by Simpson’s friendship. “I didn’t know, for those six years, that Mona was collecting,” she wrote. “I didn’t know that as I sought her consolations and took her advice, she, too, was taking.” Eventually Lisa reconciled with Simpson. They went out to a coffee shop to discuss the book, and Lisa told her that she hadn’t been able to finish it. Simpson told her she would like the ending. Over the years Lisa had an on-and-off relationship with Simpson, but it would be closer in some ways than the one she had with her father.

这本书出版前，辛普森把书稿寄给了丽萨，但最初她只读了开头。“在开始的几页里，我看到了我的家庭、我的趣事、我的物品、我的想法，我在叫简的角色中看到了我自己。”她说，“在事实之间夹杂着创作——对我来说那就是谎言，可是那又跟事实那么接近。”丽萨很受伤，她为哈佛的《代言人》杂志写了一篇文章说明原因。她的第一稿语气非常尖刻，后来在发表前她进行了一些修改。她感觉被辛普森的友谊所侵犯。“我不知道，那6年以来，莫娜一直在收集素材，”她写道，“我不知道当我寻求她的安慰、索取她的建议时，她同样也在索取。”最终，丽萨和辛普森达成了和解。她们一起去咖啡厅讨论这本书，丽萨告诉辛普森她没能读完它。辛普森说她会喜欢那个结局。多年来，丽萨跟辛普森的关系时好时坏，但是比跟她父亲的关系更加亲密。