Steve Jobs' tantric sex and past lives: It's all in ex-girlfriend's new book

Chrisann Brennan's memoir gives a closer looks at the Apple co-founder's life in the 1970s

James Legge
Friday 18 October 2013 11:16 BST
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Apple co-founder Steve Jobs
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs (Getty Images)

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Steve Jobs' ex-girlfriend has published an intimate memoir of her time with the Apple visionary, which boasts tales of suspected reincarnation, tantric sex in a shed and a hastily inflating ego.

Chrisann Brennan's book recounts the time during the 1970s when she was living with Jobs and his colleague, Daniel Kottke, as they were launching Apple and she worked a menial job at their plant.

Brennan, who first met Jobs in 1972 while they were both students in Cupertino, California, released The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life With Steve Jobs this week.

In it, she divulges that the Apple founder, who died in 2011, thought he had been a World War II pilot in a past life.

"He’d tell me how, when driving, he felt a strong impulse to pull the steering wheel back as if for takeoff," she writes. "It was a curious thing for him to say, but he did have that sense of unadorned glamour from the forties.

"He loved the big band sound of Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, and Count Basie. At the first Apple party he even danced like he was from the forties."

The pair split in 1977, after Brennan got pregnant with Jobs' first child, Lisa. He at first denied paternity, though he later accepted it.

The book includes a story of when he returned from a trip to India in 1974, with increased spiritual leanings. It reads: “It all broke open between us when he asked if I would make tantric love with him in his garden shed.” She says she refused, saying they were not spiritually prepared.

The details go on: “Our birth control method up to that point was Steve’s coitus interruptus, also called the pull-out method, which for him was about his conserving his energy for work.”

And Jobs' famous ego also had an effect on the relationship, as he grew in self-regard and refused to perform everyday tasks.

This became apparent after a party in their house. Brennan writes: "What I do remember is that the next morning there was a confusing moment when Steve, looking around and squinting, asked what we should do with 'it.'

"I didn’t understand the question until I realised that he was asking if there was a service we could call in to take care of the dirty dishes. Doing the dishes ourselves was simply no longer an option for Steve. He had entered into an elite world where others took care of the lower-level functions so that he could operate with more efficiency, on his presumably higher plane.

"I not too happily cleaned them up by myself."

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