In From Here to the Great Unknown, Lisa Marie Presley and her daughter Riley Keough offer up a memoir filled with details salacious, sorrowful, and deeply sentimental.
The story belongs mostly to Presley, the only child of Elvis and Priscilla Presley. After dedicating years to recording her recollections on audio tapes, she asked Keough to help her finish her memoir. A month later, in January 2023, Presley died from a complication of bowel surgery, leaving Keough to complete the work by herself. The tales unfold from their alternating perspectives, which are distinguished by two different fonts. While Keough’s role is primarily to clarify and contextualize her mother’s experiences, Presley holds nothing back about her wild and singular life.
The architecture of the memoir is chronological, beginning with Presley’s reminiscences of her early childhood with her legendary father at his Memphis home, Graceland. “He was a god to me,” she says. “A chosen human being.” After her parents divorced when she was 4, she was devasted to be separated from Elvis most of the time. During her unsupervised visits to Graceland, she had almost absolute freedom because her dad slept most of the day. “There were times where I would eat French fries for three days straight,” she recalls, “or I wouldn’t take a bath for ten days.” She lacked an authority figure, but she adored her father, whose demons and drug addiction she sensed and even came to share: “I have everything in me that wants to numb out, too.” His death came as a shock. “My life as I knew it was completely over,” she says.
Presley started drinking and using drugs at a young age. Her relationship with Priscilla was fraught, and she railed against her mother’s concerted efforts to control her. She was molested by her mother’s boyfriend from ages 11 to 14, at which point she got involved with a man in his 20s. After he sold naked photographs of her, Presley attempted suicide by overdosing on Valium.
She got together with musician Danny Keough in her late teens and describes purposefully getting pregnant. “Danny knew he had to marry me,” she writes. “I trapped him. I didn’t really mean to, but I did.” Married at 20, Presley gave birth to Riley at 21 and, shortly afterward, her son Ben.
Presley had met Michael Jackson as a child, a detail she’d forgotten but the singer remembered, and they reconnected in her early 20s. They fell in love, fast, and Presley divorced Keough to be with Jackson. Some of her descriptions of this relationship are even more unexpected than the relationship itself: “He told me he was still a virgin”; “I fell in love with him because he was normal…. No one had ever seen him with his guard down”; “I was actually so happy. I’ve never been that happy again.”
Keough writes, “Michael was larger than life; he reminded her of her father. She told me that no one ever came close to being like her dad apart from Michael.”
The larger-than-life couple traveled with 10 security guards. Presley addresses rumors about Jackson by announcing, “As for child molestation, I never saw a goddamn thing like that. I personally would’ve killed him if I had.” Their marriage failed because Presley didn’t want to have children with Jackson, but by this time, 1996, he was hooked on prescription drugs and had his own anesthesiologist on staff. Following their divorce, the two maintained a relationship for a time until Presley cut it off.
A 2002 marriage to actor Nicolas Cage lasted only a few months, and Presley stayed sober until having twins in 2008 with her fourth husband, Michael Lockwood. During her C-section, she was administered painkillers to which she became addicted. She confesses, “It escalated to eighty pills a day.” When her son Ben killed himself in 2020, Presley came unhinged. She kept his body in her Calabasas, California, home for two months, on dry ice. Keough writes that her mother “chose to live the rest of her life in mourning. She wasn’t interested in talking about anything other than my brother anymore. She would say that her life was over, that she was only here for her other children, but that she was torn, because she had three children here on earth, but one child somewhere else.” Keough intuited her mother would not survive Ben’s death. In an elemental way, she was right.
In the preface, Keough writes of her mother, “I’ve come to understand that her burning desire to tell her story was born of a need to both understand herself and be understood by others in full, for the first time.” In this raw memoir, readers will find in Presley a multidimensional, complicated woman who doubted herself (and the value of her life story) yet lays all of her cards on the table.
Sarah Norris has written about books and culture for The New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle, The Village Voice, and others. After many years away, she’s back in her hometown of Nashville.
Tagged: Book Reviews, Nonfiction
