Book Review: "From Here to the Great Unknown" by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough

There are few things more embarrassing than having such a book covering the experiences of living with Elvis Presley on the day it came out and not reading it until *checks notes* yesterday. Basically, it's been little over a year since it's release. I'm not going to lie, I bought it on my phone and kind of forgot it was there until now and well, it isn't too long but it is definitely heartbreaking and beautiful. There are very few autobiographies I have enjoyed reading in my time, often being very choosy about which ones I spend my time with but I have to say, I can't believe I waited so long to read this one - it's fantastic.

Apart from having a first-hand account of living with her father and ultimately, seeing him die - we get insight into Lisa Marie's more complicated relationship with her mother. If we go back in time, we are met with the history of Graceland and how it came to be the happiest place she had ever been. Her memories of her father are nearly always positive but also complex because of who he was. When he dies, she is flung into a world where her tyrannical mother seems to reign supreme. She is constantly 'sent away' to different places and schools - for example: one of the schools she went to was a french instutition where she was forced to learn the language as at the time, her mother had a french boyfriend. It seems a bit asinine to do that to a child without consulting them first. We often feel sorry for Lisa Marie's position as nothing was of her own making and even more so now, since she has since died.

We get stories of her mother entering the Church of Scientology and her going along too. She makes comments about how the church has helped her understand herself. I'm not going to make much comment here because I think we are all very aware of how I feel about organised religion of any kind, let alone one as controversial as Scientology. It's not my place to say how others should feel. One thing we do learn about through this is her relationship with her first husband, Danny Keough - the father of the co-author of the book, actress and daughter, Riley. These memories are all interspersed with memories of her father, not just during his life but also shortly afterwards. Memories such as Lisa Marie playing his music, getting drunk and crying, memories of never being able to hear his voice whilst sober. Honestly, this is heartbreaking. She was never able to confront that grief because the entire world felt like they owned him. It's quite complicated and I can understand why she would struggle to relate to other people.

We have this ever-present grief tied to her father's death which often returns in different ways throughout the text - one of those ways is through the suicide of her son, Benjamin, in 2020. I feel like Lisa Marie, like her ex-husband Michael Jackson, never got a moment's rest from the press and if we were to look it up there are even pictures of Priscilla holding the baby wrapped in a blanket in the year 1968 - the year Lisa Marie was born. Honestly, I genuinely cannot understand how she put up with it for so long. But, through the grief and turmoil, through never having a moment to rest, we also get details of her struggles with opioid addiction. The burden and weight of being Elvis's only child, the constant harrassment from the press, the horrors of her son's death and it all still didn't stop for her. Even when she died herself, her mother still loomed as this horrifying presence, attempting only to gain control of every assett available and apparently having no concern for her daughter's health and life - a common theme Lisa Marie herself mentions throughout the book.

One thing I loved about this book is that you can feel Riley's collaboration very clearly in this book. We have her mother's tapes and the idea that she had requested Riley's help to complete the memoir. So after Lisa Marie's section finishes in the chapter, we then have this reflection from the outside, told from the perspective of Riley Keough. This is littered with times in the car, times where she knew something was wrong with her mother and often a better perpective upon Lisa Marie that Lisa Marie herself had of her own mother. It is a beautiful way to write but an awful reason to have to split it this way since Lisa Marie's vision of a memoir had remained unfinished before her death.

This is a wonderful, sad, funny and often heartbreaking book. There's so many memories in here that I highly doubt you'll find anywhere else. It's told wonderfully and the book reads like an authentic look into the heart of the aftermath of the American Dream. I was astounded.