Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough’s ‘Great Unknown’ Is Engrossing

However sad you are expecting “From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir” will be, take heed: it’s sadder than that. This new volume, started by Lisa Marie Presley before her 2022 death and completed recently by daughter Riley Keough, falls squarely into the realm of autobio-tragedy — bracingly looking at how depression and addiction issues repeat themselves generationally, with almost none of the sentimentalized overlay you might expect a book of this kind to impose. “I wondered how many times a heart can break,” Keough writes near the end. As a reader, you may have already been keeping some kind of mental score.

It’s a lot. But it’s not a slog: “From Here to the Great Unknown” is engrossing from start to finish. The fact that it remains that constantly absorbing maybe comes against some odds, since the emotional trajectory of Lisa Marie’s life is never much in doubt… not when she writes, “The sadness started at 9 when he [Elvis Presley] died, and  it never left,” and Riley confirms, “She was heartbroken my whole life.” But of course the book benefits from delivering the goods on a myriad of subjects any reader with a modicum of interest in celebrity has naturally wanted to know more about, from Elvis’ temperament to how Lisa Marie got along with Priscilla Presley (spoiler: rarely well) to her marriage to Michael Jackson, which merits a book unto itself. Lisa Marie may rarely have felt satisfied in her life, but as a last act, she satisfies our curiosity, in a torrent of unexpected candor.

The book benefits from having two writers, too, forced by necessity to have conjoined perspectives. Lisa Marie was pretty self-aware by the time her life was coming to a premature end at age 54 — she had run out of bullshit, as the kids say — but not so 100% self-conscious that the contextualizing doesn’t benefit from Keough’s often preternaturally calm take on the chaos that was her mom’s life. Riley is there to fill in the gaps, also, on stuff that Lisa Marie never got around to talking about in the tapes she was recording as the basis of a memoir.

The shifts between Presley’s dictation and Keough’s writing are marked by changes in typeface, and the transitions are fairly clear… save for a few early passages that have to deal with growing up with Priscilla, or other matriarchs of the family, in which we sometimes have to remind ourselves which of the book’s two writers is talking about which generation of “she.” (Pro tip: If someone is writing “My mom had my grandmother’s chilly disposition, which she got from her mother, my great grandmother,” the coolness is a tip-off that this is Lisa Marie referring to Priscilla.) Any such mental straightening-out we have to do as readers doesn’t last long, anyway. And bouncing a bit between perspectives gives the writing some stylistic and emotional dynamics we couldn’t expect out of a typical autobiography.

If there’s any one thing you come away with from the book, it might be: Being a true daddy’s girl or mama’s boy is going to end in tears. Lisa Marie from the start was as slavishly devoted to her father as he was to his mother, Gladys. She had some fear of her father’s volcanic temper, but she also had an understanding that rage was a place he visited, not that he lived in 24/7 — and mostly she experienced his spoiling, and a lot of late-night father/daughter hangs upstairs at Graceland (a part of the house she would continue to visit up until her death). After her parents divorce in her fourth year of life, Mom is strict and often absent, but in the blissful summers and holidays she spends in Memphis, indulgent Dad lets her commandeer golf carts, summarily fire Graceland staffers and subsist on a diet of nothing but French fries for three days at a time. There are some fun memories of growing up, like her Aunt Delta cursing tourists coming through the house and giving them the finger. The dreadful turn comes when, at age 9, she’s screaming as Elvis’ body is carried out of the house, inconsolable not just in the moment but, in some sense, for all time. Back in California, she says, “I kept my watch on Memphis time.” And as for the mother/daughter connection: “Scientology kind of raised me for her.”

Early relationships, all the way up to her first marriage to Danny Keough, are seen as being as much a way of escaping from her unhappy home life by being a wild child as much as a desire for romance. But true love finally rears its head in the form of an unlikely courtship by Michael Jackson, which leaves Lisa Marie utterly smitten, and not displeased when Danny learns what’s happening and walks out. (In the divorce, which had no prenup, she says she forced Keough to take some money, as they continued to be the most fraternal exes ever.) Jackson told her he was a virgin at the time they connected, which led her to think maybe they would wait till the wedding night to physically consummate the relationship — only to be surprised when he got passionately aggressive much sooner than that. “I was actually so happy. I’ve never been that happy again,” she says of their “just fucking normal” marriage. As for the molestation allegations, “I never saw a goddamn thing like that,” which seems to be as much consideration as she ever gave the possibility, amid their initial marital bliss.

So what went wrong in this idyllic meeting of two supercelebs with a commiseration few others in the world could have shared? Jackson’s increasing dependence on drugs, she says, and an accompanying paranoia… and her suspicion that maybe she was being used after all. A eureka moment comes for her when Michael plants a dramatic, unplanned kiss on her at the ’94 VMAs, and she wonders to herself, “Did he just do that for press?” She also becomes suspicious that he may have viewed her mostly as a potential baby machine: “I figured Michael would have the children and then dump me.” Then, in her telling, Jackson faked a fall and goes into a medical stay just to get out of a commitment to HBO, seeming to turn his hospital room into a veritable drug den. (“Nobody has their own anesthesialogist,” she contends, but he did.) Jackson sends her away from the hospital, saying “You’re causing too many problems,” and she files for divorce days later. But visits to Neverland continue for a few years, with Riley jumping in to say, “I don’t know if they were still hooking up.”

After those first good times with Jackson, anyway, in her view, he’s like her very first boyfriend, who sold her out after a two-and-a-half-year relationship by allegedly taking a payment from a paparazzo to shoot surreptitious pictures of their breakup. In Riley’s view, she suffered from lifelong feelings of being unlovable, from learning that Priscilla had wanted a miscarriage all the way through the feeling that lovers and even husbands wanted something other than love out of her. Riley writes that after a fairly tranquil decade after the divorce from Jackson, her mother began to blow things up in her life — firing virtually all of the staff that had been like friends to them, as well as cutting off actual friends… and even losing her religion. (Presley apparently never got around to dictating a section on why she quit Scientology in the 2000s, or if she did, Riley didn’t use it, but it’s not addressed for more than a moment.)

Presley remarried and, using IVF, had twin daughters at 40 — which, oddly, marked the beginning of a long downfall. “My mom’s spirit was brimming with maternal love,” Riley writes, even though “I don’t think it was something that was passed on to her necessarily,” she adds. What was passed on, on her father’s side, was being prone to addiction, even though this hadn’t been a problem up till this point. Whether or not there was “a genetic component to my mom’s addiction,” says Riley, “either way, it just waited around all her life until right after my sisters were born. And then it showed up and burned everything down. … We never could have imagined it would be something that would come for her so viciously, so late in life.” Lisa Marie was prescribed opioids due to having a C-section, and she remained fiercely dependent on them for most of the remainder of her life… although, in a comedy of drug-taking errors, she would delve into cocaine as her way of trying to get off the opioids, only to revert to the pills as a way of kicking the powder.

Stints in rehab would be cut short. “I think she felt that being honest was the virtue, rather than the changing of her behavior,” Riley says, in one of the book’s wiser moments. “Since she had admitted it to us, the honesty seemed to give her the license to continue with her addiction.” And then Keough commits to paper possibly the saddest sentences in a fairly melancholic book: “Her parenting standards were so high that I don’t think she could ever get truly sober knowing what she had put my sisters through. The one thing that she had always really prided herself on was that she was a great mother. She said, ‘My music wasn’t that successful, I didn’t finish high school, I’m not beautiful, I’m not good enough — but I’m a great mother.’ When she started to feel like she wasn’t even that, she couldn’t handle it, so she doubled down.”

If reading that doesn’t break your heart, as it should, hold on… it gets tougher. It will surprise probably no one reading this book to be reminded that Riley’s younger brother, Ben — who she doesn’t hesitate to suggest had an even tighter bond with Lisa Marie than she did, as a true mother’s boy — died in 2020. After never having been in therapy, and apparently mentioning that he might “have a mental health issue” just once in a text, he went to get a beer at a party, and got a gun instead. Riley imagines he couldn’t handle the protracted weight of his beloved mother in pain. The effect on Lisa Marie is not hard to foresee, as Riley has to “tell my mom that the second man she loved the most in the world is gone,” but the daughter and sister takes a rare moment in the book to actually say how she’s feeling, describing a grief that anyone who’s been through anything similar will recognize, where it’s “too painful to cry… a terrifying, bottomless pain… I was more physically incapacitated than my parents.”

You aren’t looking to the final third or so of this tome for levity. But you get some anyway, sort of, in the form of an anecdote that has already become famous within a day of the book’s release. Lisa Marie keeps Ben’s body in the house for two months, on dry ice, at 55 degrees, with some advising from a sympathetic funeral home director. “I think it would scare the living fucking piss out of anybody else to have their son there like that. But not me,” Lisa Marie writes. “The normal process of death is: The person dies, they have an autopsy, viewing, funeral, buried, boom. It’s all over in a four- or five-day period, maybe a week if you’re lucky. But you don’t really have a chance to process it. I felt so fortunate that there was a way that I could still parent him, delay it a bit longer so that I could become okay with laying him to rest.” This is not funny stuff, but at some point, a tattoo artist comes to the house to give Lisa Marie and Riley inkings of Ben’s name on their hands that will match the ones he had of their names on his. When the artist asks if he can see a photo of Ben’s tattoos, Lisa Marie leads him to the next room instead to show him the real thing.

“I’ve had an extremely absurd life, but this moment is in the top five,” admits Riley. “Even my mom said that she could feel him talking to her, saying, ‘This is insane, Mom, what are you doing? What the fuck!’”

The remaining passages offer a portrait of someone who, for the last couple years of her life, has one foot in this world and one out, although there are some surprisingly hopeful and hard-fought moments in her latter days. “After Ben Ben died, I knew that my mom wouldn’t survive it for very long. She did not want to be here,” Riley writes, and Lisa Marie says, spookily: “The real me, whoever I had been, detonated completely a year and a half ago. The truth is that I don’t remember who I was.” And yet, she says, at some point, “I stopped wanting to die every day.” She goes snorkeling and ziplining, with Riley describing her as “more present” than she had been in years, even taking steps toward becoming some sort of influencer in the grief field. Most importantly, she seems to be off the opiates, at least mostly, facing her sorrow head-on… and it’s a motherf—er. Keough says she’s proud, in so many words, that her mother didn’t die of an overdose, small a comfort as that is to take.

With an estate involved that has as much at stake as the Elvis estate, you may keep waiting for the more upbeat spin that Riley is going to put on all this at some point, if only so that the book can be sold in the Graceland gift shop. It probably will be anyway, but not because any punches are being pulled here. There’s a brutal honesty that you have to think probably wouldn’t have survived if Lisa Marie had survived long enough to clean up the rawness of her feelings on the tapes she left behind. For better or worse, and you have to think better, she was captured at a point in time when she had exactly zero fucks left to give. And Riley, for all of the relatively sanguine parts of her public persona, has admirably seen no need to sugarcoat any of it, either.  Nor does she tie things up with any easy lessons, although there are plenty to be inferred. (“Don’t over-spoil,” “don’t under-spoil” and “look out for each other” are probably there, implicitly, for the taking.)

The book does raise the question of how much biology is destiny. The impression left is that Ben and Lisa Marie both inherited from Elvis some kind of curse that may have been more genetic than exactly generational. And in a couple of interesting passages, Lisa Marie talks about how people always told her she looked so sad — a source of complaint for her, even as she finally acknowledged that it wasn’t just the so-called Presley pout: she really was as sad as she appeared. And yet Riley, by her account, does not seem to have picked up the addictive gene — and even in the midst of dealing with tragedy, it always looks as if her mouth is just waiting to curl those Presley lips into a smile.

So was it celebrity, nature, or lack-of-nurture that made Lisa Marie’s life such a melancholic one? These aren’t easy puzzles to solve, least of all in a fairly straightforward, first- and second-hand accounting like this one. But here’s to Keough addressing some of those issues further when she pens her own memoir, a happier one about breaking generational expectations and patterns, 30 or 40 or 50 years from now.