Mona Simpson: The famous family ties of Steve Jobs

Did you know that the biological sister of Steve Jobs is a famous novelist?

Jobs, who was born to an American graduate student mother and a Syrian political science student father, was adopted right after birth.

His adoptive parents were a couple from Mountain View, California. Soon after that, though, his biological parents got married and had a daughter, Mona.

As International Business Times reports, after her parents divorced, Mona took the last name of Simpson, her stepfather’s name. Simpson and Jobs didn’t meet until he was 27 years old; she invited him to a party in NYC after her novel “Anywhere But Here” was published. (It was later made into a movie starring Natalie Portman.)

In 1996, Simpson published “A Regular Guy,” a novel that many suspect is not-so-loosely based on her brother’s life. The main character, Thomas Rudolf Owens, is a judgmental genius who is paranoid about his privacy. Owens at first denies being the father of his daughter. In real life, Jobs also claimed he was not the father of Lisa Brennan-Jobs, who he later acknowledged as his daughter. Coincidence?

Simpson later married Richard Appel, one of the writers for “The Simpsons.” The IBT reports that Appel named Homer Simpson’s mother after his wife, Mona.

And that’s your “Did-you-know-this-about-Steve-Jobs” factoid of the day!