By Lisa Marie Presley

Review by Diedre Johnson

Reading From Here to the Great Unknown, the authorized memoir taken from Lisa Marie Presley’s voice recordings with organization and narrative from her daughter, the actress Riley Keough, is an intimate look at rock and roll icon Elvis Presley and, for this writer, a little like revisiting the South.

Although Lisa Marie (who died in January 2023) had long lived in Los Angeles, Hawaii, and even the UK since the long-ago days with her dad at Graceland, her stories are filled with sentences that can remind one of just being a Southern kid, even if your Daddy was a rock star. Like the time Elvis went into her bedroom and killed what she thought was a rat (because rats can get into anywhere, especially a mansion set in a rural area). A few goddamnits later, it was dead. So was the snake Elvis killed with a shotgun while sitting under a tree.

Elvis’s only daughter describes the smallness of Graceland in comparison to the mansions and mini-mansions. It was a time when grandparents, aunts, uncles, and many other relatives all lived there or had houses on the acreage. And as Riley takes the narrative, she describes the house surrounded by magnolias, oaks, pecan and cherry trees, and the fireflies at night. The time after Elvis’s death, Lisa Marie, Priscilla, and her brother Ben would stay upstairs in rooms hidden from the public while tourists below toured the rest of the house. Some of the same cooks who constantly worked in the kitchen to fulfill Elvis’s every craving often returned on those holidays.

“My mom would have them cook everything she loved growing up: fried chicken and catfish, hush puppies and greens, banana pudding.”

Juxtaposed by two different typefaces and separated by storytelling paragraphs representing Lisa and then Riley. The book is sentimental but stark, never glossing over the hard stuff. In her words, Lisa Marie explained the experience of watching paramedics working on Elvis and sitting with him. At the same time, he lies in repose in his coffin, and Riley’s comments on her mom’s trauma, something people didn’t call it then. Lisa Marie’s wild child teen and young adult years are detailed, including her dabbling in drugs—from valium to cocaine, plus her troubled times adjusting to her mom’s rules and burgeoning Hollywood lifestyle, including allegedly getting molested by one of her mother’s boyfriends. The book includes details of her and Priscilla’s time in Scientology, breaking up her marriage to Riley’s father, Danny Keough, for Michael Jackson, what caused Lisa Marie’s drug problem to finally stick, her time trying to find a place as a singer but always feeling overshadowed by her insecurities and her father’s fame and talent. Her unrelenting, sorrowful grief after losing her Elvis-look-alike son, Benjamin, to suicide.

Mostly, though, this is a promise kept by a daughter to get what her mom, a celebrity and the only child of a mega-famous father, wanted the world to know. The result is an intimate story for Elvis (and Lisa Marie) fans, a reminiscence of mid-century Memphis, and a completion of a life.

Home

From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir LA Public Library Book Review