November 14 - Review From Here to the Great Unknown

In 2022, audiences were introduced to the ‘ELVIS’ biopic, followed by the ‘Priscilla’ movie in 2023. In both films, Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis’ only child, was largely absent from the story, likely because she was still a child when he passed away. 

Now, in 2024, Riley Keough gives her mother a voice through this memoir. Does this biography complete the Presley family history?

Design

What first strikes you about this book is the cover. Taken from a well-known Presley family photoshoot, it’s clear that Priscilla has been cropped out. Elvis peers mischievously around the corner, while Lisa Marie stares into the camera with a cold expression. 

The initial reaction might be, why not use some of the more “happy” images from this shoot of Elvis and his daughter with her blonde pigtails? But as you read the book, the choice becomes clear: this is a fitting image.

When it comes to photographs, one thing missing in this memoir is a dedicated photo section. With so many beautiful and relevant images available, the biography would have benefitted from more illustrations to accompany the various stages of Lisa Marie’s life. Pictures help to keep the memory of a person alive, and here we’re only given about 10 snapshot-like photos. The one photo that stands out it the candid of mother and daughter on the back, where Riley sticks out her tongue playfully. A more cheerful image of Elvis and his daughter on the front would have complemented this one well.

The title of the book, a lyric from ‘Where No One Stands Alone’, one of Lisa Marie Presley’s duets with her father, hints at the emotional depth of the book. Now, her daughter Riley has done something similar, using material that her mother recorded in the last years of her life. 

Keough enlisted help to bring her mother’s words to life, with actress Julia Roberts lending her voice to Lisa Marie. Roberts commented, “I was so moved by Lisa Marie’s incredible memoir. It was a real privilege to give voice to her wild and beautiful life, and I deeply appreciate Riley entrusting me with her mother’s story.” 
Audiobook listeners have said that it’s worth experiencing the audio version, as each chapter begins with a short clip from the tapes Lisa Marie recorded, making this memoir feel personal and poignant.

Content

The memoir can be summarized as: In this account of the Elvis’ only child, mother and daughter cover the highs and lows of a tumultuous life. Lisa Marie recalls her childhood at Graceland, including the trauma of finding her father dead at age 9, experiencing sexual abuse from her mother’s boyfriend a year later, and a suicide attempt at 16. Her teenage years were largely shaped by Priscilla Presley’s hands-off approach, which included dropping Lisa Marie off at the Church of Scientology’s Celebrity Centre. 

Searching for love, purpose, and belonging, Lisa Marie went through four marriages: with Danny Keough (her “partner” until her death), Nicolas Cage, and famously, Michael Jackson, before her final marriage to Michael Lockwood. Her relationships included one abortion (“the stupidest thing I’ve ever done”), a daughter and son (with Keough), and twin daughters (with Lockwood). 

After a C-section with her twins, she developed a serious opioid addiction, that escalated to 80 pills daily. Her grief compounded when her son took his life in 2020. After that, she was never the same, ultimately passing in 2023 from a cardiac arrest due to a small bowel obstruction.

Though the summary sounds harsh, so, unfortunately, was much of Lisa Marie’s life. On the first pages, she sets the tone, revealing that she adored her father, wanted to do anything for him, and was always seeking his approval, even when he was unfairly angry.

She recalls kissing her father goodnight on the night he passed, telling him she loved him, to which he responded, “Go to bed”. The next morning, the nine-year-old saw her father being wheeled into an ambulance, learning he had tragically passed. “My life as I knew it was completely over,” she wrote.

About her mother, she writes that she may have wanted to be rid of her (unborn child) even before she was born. Priscilla got pregnant at the age of 22, but she didn’t want to have a baby because she wanted to be that beautiful, slim woman beside Elvis, given all the competition she thought she saw. Lisa Marie said ”I was a pain in her ass immediately, and I always felt she didn’t want me”. 

Overall Priscilla comes across as a southern belle ice queen in the book. Lisa Marie wrote: “It was a one-two punch: he’s dead, and I’m stuck with her.” When they joined Scientology, Lisa felt her mother “dumped” her there. Later, they reached a truce when both had small children, but you don’t sense a real reconciliation. “People think I’m a bitch because I have my mom’s chilly thing” Lisa wrote. The book omits Priscilla’s role in caring for Lisa Marie’s twins during Lisa’s rehab battles. 

Many other details, including her music career and charity work with “Presley Place,” are only lightly touched upon. Also absent are Lisa’s half-brother Navarone and of course Lisa’s twins Finley and Harper and the custody battle with Lockwood (who is completely omitted), but perhaps that was done to protect these young girls. 

As Riley worked from tapes her mother recorded in her lowest moments they are “raw and honest”. She transcribed and edited the tapes, and adding her commentary, she noted in the preface that her mother “was constitutionally incapable of hiding anything from me”. 

The alternating mother and daughter narration, resulting in "a haunting harmony that builds to a crescendo of heartbreak" according to the New York Times. Reading the book you see that Riley add a more holistic view to these memories, as she set out to do.

As Variety aptly put it: “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”. 

Riley has her way with words and provides a fitting context for the stories her mother left behind. These are written in a somewhat staccato manner, they seem like short quotes from the tapes, placed one after the other. I sometimes wondered whose biography I was reading because Riley used the first person form. But doing so, she took me on the journey of her mother’s life.

Listening to the audio-book edition it is a very strange experience to hear Lisa’s voice. I never really listened to her speaking voice, but listening now, it is a little haunting, and in some fragments she kind-off sounds like she is on something, just listening to how she talks. But perhaps that added to the honesty of the memories she recorded for herself.

Using fragments with Lisa's voice make the audiobook very real, Lisa's story comes alive, as it is not only told by others. Riley's voice sounds like she is telling the stories from her life and perspective. At the same time,  she also sounds a bit sad, which is completely understandable when you realize the task she gave herself finish her mother’s book so shortly after her unexpected death. I wouldn’t want to stand in her Gucci shoes. But being Lisa's daughter, listening to her voice makes adds to de personal listening experience of this memoir.  

That said, Julia Robert's narration of Lisa's voice had more, or should I say the right intonation, she plays this role perfectly, you can tell she is an actresses. I'm not a fan of audiobooks, but here it really has additional value and it is worth considering to get this a version next to the physical copy.

Some people will find the book too honest and / or won't like the book. Beginning with her mother Priscilla, who had a strained relationship with the daughter she didn't want / couldn’t love or the rumored rift with Priscilla in the final years before she died, or her opposition to the release of her self-titled movie. 

Elvis’ last girlfriend Ginger Alden may feel criticized. Lisa Marie doubts if she really loved her father since they had so many arguments (and which Lisa Marie overheard eavesdropping the phone at Graceland) and she asks the question if Ginger was really there for her father when he needed her. “I didn’t mind Ginger, but I didn’t like her. Nobody did”. 

And finally is Michael Edwards, who molested / sexually abused her and used drugs with Priscilla in a violent relationship, according to the memoir. This part of the book is deleted from the book in the United Kingdom, Australia and several other countries. 

Various media outlets have asked Priscilla for a comment, but she has not commented, though she may address these claims in her own memoir expected in 2025. Edwards reacted that some parts regarding his feelings for Lisa Marie in his own biography (1988) were written to “sell books”, but the notion that he molested Lisa Marie was “just a fabrication” according to Edwards. 

Lisa Marie credited her mother for choosing not to spoil her, unlike her dad, and instilling discipline, sending her to boarding school where she could be herself, work in her own tempo, finding her own way in life. Unfortunately, she took a wrong turn ending doing the works: “sex and drugs and Rock and Roll”.

Surprisingly, Michael Jackson is portrayed positively. Keogh recalls: “At home they were a regular married couple. They would drive us to school together in the morning, just like a normal family, though sometimes Michael would bring along a chimpanzee". It revealed a side to the man rarely seen. Presley and Jackson were the only two people who could understand the fundamental strangeness of each other’s lives, and they could bare their souls to each other without fear of judgment. “I fell in love with him because he was normal,” Presley writes, a comment on Jackson you don’t read every day.

Danny Keough, her first love, remained her soulmate to the end, living in the same house. And although they knew they would not make it as a married couple, they stayed connected while living their own lives “together”, until the very last moment. He seems always present in the background throughout the book.

Reading her story, Lisa Marie resembled her father more than expected, both seeking life’s meaning through destructive paths. Both found comfort in spirituality and similar books, revealing the close bond she shared with her father, with her first line: “I felt my father could change the weather. He was a God to me. A chosen human being”.

Curiously, the 10 happy years in England were also the years that the addiction to drugs returned. This is not really explained, other than that the addiction had always been lurking, and moved far from the friends who had surrounded her before they got a hold of her again. Her son Ben, whom she compared to Elvis’ bond with his mother, eventually shared her struggles.

Despite the personal experiences with drugs-users, Riley sounds a little naïve about the use of substances and even Elvis abuse, downplaying it. At one point she even contradicts her mother’s memories of Elvis’ outbreaks when he needed a fix, saying Elvis just followed doctor’s orders. No it was the other way around, he told the doctors what to prescribe him. 

It was sad to read the chapter about Riley’s brother Ben. His death and farewell are mainly told through the eyes of Riley, while it was the proverbial final blow for her mother. From then on, Lisa Marie’s own death was something of a foregone conclusion. If his mother felt that, both by nature and by nurture, “Ben didn’t stand a fucking chance,” then she was equally cursed: “I guess I didn’t really have a shot in hell”.

The book also highlights Priscilla’s absence during Lisa’s hardest times. It’s painful to read how Riley had to inform her mother of Ben’s death and how she learned of her mother’s passing while on a plane to Los Angeles on the way to see her. 
The book ends with a personal touch from a daughter who recently had become a mother (new of the birth of Elvis’ granddaughter Tupelo broke during the memorial service for Lisa Marie) and the joy the newborn brought Lisa Marie.

Conclusion

This memoir is the story Lisa Marie never completed. Writing this book, Riley Keough wanted “to make her mother known”, and she succeeded, these are the last words of the only child of an American icon. It’s also, in part, Riley’s memoir of her first 35 years, as she literally presents her mother’s story and her version of the events. Riley’s words give context and continuity to the stories her mother left behind. 

And although it is not an Elvis book - he is only present in the first two chapters - it is a real gift to Elvis fans. It offers a unique, intimate insight into the idiosyncrasies of growing up Presley, with all its wealth and absurdities and surprising normalities like Lisa Marie and Michael Jackson being “an ordinary couple” bringing the kids to school (OK, occasionally with a chimpanzee in tow).

The conclusion left after reading the book is that Lisa Marie had a sad life. She is quoted saying that grief “anchors itself in your system”, and for Lisa Marie, this may have started even before she was born. That makes this book, at moments, a gut-punch and a jaw-dropper. 

But what also comes through the pages is a sensitive, gentle but not whitewashed portrait of a woman who is kind, intuitive, insecure, funny as hell, generous, flawed, loyal, and fiercely loving, making this a warm book, lovingly written by her daughter. It is a recommended read for anyone wanting to understand Elvis’ daughter beyond her public image and an important addition to the vast Elvis library as it paints a picture of the impact of the Presley dynasty. A dynasty enshrined in the cultural history of America like the Kennedy’s - and the problems that came with it. 

This is definitely the story of Lisa Marie Presley. Perhaps not 100 percent complete, but a 100 percent pure and soul-baring look into her life, which is important to keep the memory of the woman she truly was alive. 

Fortunately I also learned that Riley Keough is a very strong woman. She found a way to use the strength of her mother and her own talents - not using the Presley name like others - in a positive way and into decisive action. How she ended the family troubles after her mother died, and how handled the recent troubles regarding the plot to steal the Graceland Mansion are good examples. 

Riley Keough seems willing and able to safeguard the future of her family’s legacy, and that is a positive conclusion from a sad memoir.

The book is available from all major bookstores, on online through >>> Amazon.com and >>> Amazon U.K. or a local Amazon near you.