By Barbara Ellen, The Observer | Tragedy and addiction vie for your attention in this jaw-dropping memoir by the late Lisa Marie Presley, completed by her daughter from taped interviews. What to expect from Lisa Marie Presley’s memoir? Some sanitised, cagey reminiscences, dutifully studded with anecdotes about her father, Elvis, the king of rock’n’roll, who died aged 42 in 1977? Instead, it’s a warts and all jaw-dropper. The marriages (including Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage). The drugs (Lisa Marie spiralled into opioid addiction after a caesarean section to deliver her twins). And that’s before the revelations about her son Ben Keough’s 2020 suicide (she kept his body on dry ice in her California home for two months). When her actor daughter, Riley Keough (from Daisy Jones & the Six), writes that she wants Lisa Marie to emerge from the pages of the memoir as a “three-dimensional character”, she’s not kidding.
The book is co-authored by Keough from in-depth taped interviews with her mother just before her death aged 54 in 2023 (from cardiac arrest and a small bowel obstruction caused by complications from bariatric surgery). Keough’s own words appear throughout (in a different typeface), especially frequently towards the end.
First, though, we’re transported to Presley’s childhood as the overindulged princess of the Memphis, Tennessee mansion Graceland, with a hamburger-shaped bed and a plane named after her. A daddy’s girl, even after Elvis’s divorce from her mother, Priscilla, she would ride around the grounds in her own golf cart and threaten to get staff sacked.
Elvis looms large in these passages: taking his daughter on a rollercoaster with a gun in a holster; shooting snakes in the grounds. He was a long-term prescription drug addict and Lisa Marie would sometimes find him passed out on the floor. She watched Elvis carried out of Graceland the day he died: “I saw his head, I saw his body, I saw his pyjamas, and I saw his socks at the bottom of the gurney.” She was nine years old.
What would that do to a child? In subsequent years, she responded with the standard teenage cocktail of cynicism and rebellion: any drugs, bar heroin (“anything I could swallow, snort, eat, sniff”); terrible boyfriends, one of whom orchestrated a paparazzi set-up. She had howling insecurities as the daughter of the “king”. When Presley eventually made music, she resisted pressure to sound like her father.
Nor did she feel close to her mother. Elvis met Priscilla when she was 14 (“it was a different time”, writes Lisa Marie, brusquely noting they didn’t have sex until her mother was 18). Priscilla springs from these pages like some southern belle ice queen.
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Go here to read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/oct/13/from-here-to-the-great-unknown-by-lisa-marie-presley-and-riley-keough-review-a-book-built-on-grief
From Here to the Great Unknown by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough is published by Pan Macmillan (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
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From Here to the Great Unknown: Oprah’s Book Club: A Memoir Hardcover – October 8, 2024
by Lisa Marie Presley (Author), Riley Keough (Author)
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB PICK • Born to an American myth and raised in the wilds of Graceland, Lisa Marie Presley tells her whole story for the first time in this raw, riveting, one-of-a-kind memoir faithfully completed by her daughter, Riley Keough.
In 2022, Lisa Marie Presley asked her daughter to help finally finish her long-gestating memoir.
A month later, Lisa Marie was dead, and the world would never know her story in her own words, never know the passionate, joyful, caring, and complicated woman that Riley loved and now grieved.
https://www.amazon.com/Here-Great-Lisa-Marie-Presley/
Photo: From Here to the Great Unknown cover