Book review: From here to the Great Unknown by Lisa Marie Presley
In 2010 Lisa Marie Presley appeared on British television, on the Jonathan Ross show. She was there to promote her first album, To whom it may concern. Inevitably, the conversation turned to her father, the king of rock, Elvis Presley. Jonathan Ross, a big Elvis fan, asked her “ Do you ever regret being born Elvis‘s kid? “
“No,” Lisa Maria replied, “I don’t know any different and I wouldn’t regret that. There’s good and bad with everything. Everyone has their own mountain to climb.”
Her posthumous memoir From here to the Great Unknown has just been released and chronicles the particular mountain she had to climb during a short (54 years) but tumultuous life. She had four marriages (including to Michael Jackson) lost her son to suicide, overcame brutal opioid addiction, suffered sexual abuse as a child, felt unwanted by her mother, experienced personal and financial betrayal and was a magnet for the gossip pages across the world where her every move was judged.
And looming over it all was the colossal shadow of her father, a man whose image is on the front cover of books about the 20th century. The enormity of the legacy she had to carry was one under which she could have buckled but she never did. Her love and respect for her father and his position in popular culture never wavered, even in her darkest personal moments.
It’s no surprise then that the opening lines of her memoir are about him: “I felt my father could change the weather. He was a God to me. A chosen human being.”
Later in the book, after he had died, when she was just aged 9, she comments that outside Graceland, in the days that followed his death, you couldn’t see the streets, there were that many people coming to grieve him. The world had stopped, she noted.
Her own life too had changed forever. Never again would she feel as loved and protected as she did with him.There’s a sense that she spent the rest of her years endlessly searching for that feeling of security, safety and unconditional love.
Tragically, Lisa Marie did not live to complete her book. A month before she died, she asked her eldest child, actress Riley Keogh, to help her write it. Riley agreed. She says her mother wanted help with the book because she wasn’t sure whether she had anything to offer the world other than being Elvis Presley’s only child. And because she didn’t know how to write about herself, although she had a burning desire to tell her story.
Riley recognised that her mother very much had an incredible story to share beyond her Presley heritage and that her sharing of her unhappier experiences could maybe help others not feel so alone in their own despair.
So, while grieving the loss of her mother, Riley set about listening to the hours and hours of tapes her mother had recorded and completed the memoir, filling in the gaps with her own recollections.
The result is a book that almost everyone who has bought it has devoured in one sitting.
It’s written in a conversational style that pulls you in from the very first line and keeps you compulsively turning the page to learn more. It’s been described as a devastating read and a number of chapters do make for painful reading. For anyone who has lost their own mother, the preface alone is enough to bring a lump to your throat and other chapters that follow bring tears to your eyes. There have been several very emotional reviews of the memoir, on the Internet, with people crying as they talk about it.
However, it’s far from a gloomy book or a victim narrative. Lisa Marie was a vivacious, funny, self-aware, astute woman. Watch interviews with her on YouTube and you see a genuinely authentic personality, a rare thing in the business. She didn’t duck uncomfortable questions, was honest about herself and others and was witty and sharp. She was a celebrity who did not hide behind rehearsed, PR friendly answers. Nor did she seek sympathy. She just told it like it was. Search the Internet for rare interviews with Elvis and you’ll see that he had the same direct, straightforward approach to answering interviewers. Compared to the formulaic, publicist approved answers from most public figures, both Elvis and Lisa Marie were refreshingly honest and likeable.
Lisa Marie’s memoir has the same candid quality. She tells it like it was, without sugar coating. Her father was a God to her, albeit with intense moods but her mother was that chilly woman with whom she was lumbered after Elvis died. She talks openly about the sexual abuse she suffered, as a child, at the hands of her mother‘s boyfriend, about her failed marriages, the unbearable anguish her son’s suicide caused her and her own addictions. She does it with self awareness, sometimes resentment but not the whining self pity so many celebrities seems to specialise in. She counters the sadness with a wicked wit and politically incorrect asides. Her love for her children blazes through her words.
Her writing style invokes the brevity of song lyrics. It tells the story but leaves out the detail. This is both good and bad for the reader. On the one hand she tells you enough for you to draw your own conclusions and fill in your own details but on the other, it leaves you wanting more because she’s only scratched a surface that surely hides greater depths and traumas. This is most evident in the way she portrays her complex relationship with her mother Priscilla. During the promotion for the film Elvis in 2022, at times, the tension between the two women was palpable. However, while Elvis and Michael Jackson have been much discussed in the interviews that Riley has been conducting to promote the book, the role Priscilla played in Lisa Marie’s life has been something of an elephant in the room.
As a raw, unflinching glimpse, however, into a life lived in the glare of an iconic heritage, a life lived through pure emotion, a life grabbed with gusto and with intense love, this is a must read.
If ever a memoir needed to be published in several volumes, this is it. Sadly, this will not now be.
I highly recommend this engrossing, heartbreaking, funny, passionate, gut wrenching memoir.
The title, incidentally, is a line from an Elvis song called Where no one stands alone. Lisa Marie ‘duetted’ with her father on it. It’s a beautiful track and you can find it on YouTube.
Since Lisa Marie is not able to promote the book, her daughter Riley has been on the book tour in her place. On Tuesday, I attended the event in London where she spoke. She is not only an extremely talented actress (Daisy Jones and the Six) but also an award-winning director/producer.
At the talk she was a wonderfully poised speaker, taking on difficult questions and sharing, no doubt, painful moments from her life with the audience. It was a packed house. Apparently there was such a demand for tickets that the waiting list had to be closed by the theatre. There were a surprisingly number large number of young people there, in their 20s and younger who were brought to the Presley legend by their parents/grandparents or by Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 film, Elvis.
Sections of the book are written by Riley, either because her mother had not left tapes about some topic or for Riley to provide the context for something written by Lisa Marie.
In the preface Riley writes : In his poem ‘Binsey Poplars (felled 1879),’ Gerard Manley Hopkins writes of that set of chopped down trees, “After- comers cannot guess the beauty been.”
I want this book to make clear the ‘beauty been’ that was my mother.
Later she shows great insight into her mother’s life, noting :”The sadness started at 9 when he, (Elvis)died and it never left. She was heartbroken my whole life.”