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.

在麗薩搬到曼哈頓成為自由作家之后，喬布斯跟她的關系繼續起伏不定。他們的問題隨著喬布斯對克里斯安的不滿而愈加惡他給她買了一座價值70萬美元的房子，記在了麗薩名下。但是克里斯安說服麗薩簽字轉到自己名下，然后把房子賣了，用這錢跟一個精神導師出去旅行，并在巴黎生活了一陣子。錢花完以后，她回到舊金山，成為一個藝術家，創作“光繪”（LightPainting）和佛教曼荼羅。“我是個‘通靈者’，我對進化的人性和升華的地球的未來作出富有遠見的貢獻，”她在她的網站上說（赫茨菲爾德幫她維護這個網站），“當我創作這些畫并和它們共處時，我體驗著神圣微振的形狀、顏色和音頻。”有一次她需要錢治療嚴重的鼻竇感染，喬布斯拒絕支付費用，這又導致麗薩好幾年沒跟他說話。這種情況還會不斷重演。

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·辛普森把所有這些，加上她的想象，作為了她第三部小說《凡人》的藍本。該小說于1996年出版。這本書的主角是以喬布斯為原型，在一定程度上符合事實：它描寫了喬布斯對一位骨病不斷惡化的朋友的低調慷慨，如何為對方購買一輛特制的汽車；它準確地描述了他和麗薩之間關系的諸多方面，包括他最初否認他們的血緣關系。但其他部分多為虛構：例如，雖然克里斯安在麗薩很小的時候就教她開車，但是書里的“簡”5歲時開著輛卡車翻山越嶺去找她父親的情節當然是從未發生過。另外，小說里還有些小細節，用新聞學術語來說，是過于精致，無據可考，例如全書第一句就當頭一棒地如此描寫基于喬布斯的這個角色：“他是個忙得連馬桶都不沖的人。”

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，這部小說對喬布斯的虛構描述看起來很苛刻。辛普森描述她的主角，“不覺得有任何必要遷就其他人的希望或夢想”。他的衛生習慣也跟喬布斯本人一樣不靠譜。“他不信任香體劑，經常說只要飲食習慣正確，用薄荷橄欖油皂，你既不會出汗也不會有體臭。”但是這部小說在很多層面上的描寫都是很抒情和微妙的，看到結尾，這個人的形象就更加飽滿了。他失去了對他創建的這家偉大公司的控制權，他嘗試著欣賞他曾遺棄的私生女。最后一個場景，是他和女兒一起跳舞。

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.

喬布斯后來說，他從未讀過這本小說。“我聽說是關于我的，”他告訴我，“如果它是關于我的，我真的會很憤怒，可是我不想對我妹妹發怒，所以我沒讀。”但是，這本書面世幾個月后，他告訴《紐約時報》他讀了這本書，并在主角身上看到了自己的影子。“這個角色的25%左右完全是我，直指我那些怪癖，”他對記者史蒂夫·洛爾（SteveLohr）說，“當然我不會告訴你是哪25%。”他妻子說，實際上喬布斯只瞟了這本書一眼，然后讓她替他讀，看看他應該如何理解。

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.

這本書出版前，辛普森把書稿寄給了麗薩，但最初她只讀了開頭。“在開始的幾頁里，我看到了我的家庭、我的趣事、我的物品、我的想法，我在叫簡的角色中看到了我自己。”她說，“在事實之間夾雜著創作——對我來說那就是謊言，可是那又跟事實那么接近。”麗薩很受傷，她為哈佛的《代言人》雜志寫了一篇文章說明原因。她的第一稿語氣非常尖刻，后來在發表前她進行了一些修改。她感覺被辛普森的友誼所侵犯。“我不知道，那6年以來，莫娜一直在收集素材，”她寫道，“我不知道當我尋求她的安慰、索取她的建議時，她同樣也在索取。”最終，麗薩和辛普森達成了和解。她們一起去咖啡廳討論這本書，麗薩告訴辛普森她沒能讀完它。辛普森說她會喜歡那個結局。多年來，麗薩跟辛普森的關系時好時壞，但是比跟她父親的關系更加親密。