From Here to the Great Unknown
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Average rating4
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.
Riley got the tapes that her mother had recorded for the book, lay in her bed, and listened as Lisa Marie told story after story about smashing golf carts together in the yards of Graceland, about the unconditional love she felt from her father, about being upstairs, just the two of them. About getting dragged screaming out of the bathroom as she ran toward his body on the floor. About living in Los Angeles with her mother, getting sent to school after school, always kicked out, always in trouble. About her singular, lifelong relationship with Danny Keough, about being married to Michael Jackson, what they had in common. About motherhood. About deep addiction. About ever-present grief. Riley knew she had to fulfill her mother’s wish to reveal these memories, incandescent and painful, to the world.
To make her mother known.
This extraordinary book is written in both Lisa Marie’s and Riley’s voices, a mother and daughter communicating—from this world to the one beyond—as they try to heal each other. Profoundly moving and deeply revealing, From Here to the Great Unknown is a book like no other—the last words of the only child of an American icon.
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My goodness.
This is a book that I wasn't sure how to rate. I mean, I liked it well enough. The time frame jumped around a lot, so at times I got confused. I really liked the parts with Elvis & I think that Riley's part in this book was a nice addition. We got two viewpoints and there were a few times in this book where Riley called her mother out on a few things. That made it feel very authentic. However, this was a short memoir and there were many things left out.
The emotion that I felt after finishing this book was just overwhelming sadness. I finished this up right before bed. That was a mistake because I got to the last 2 chapters and I was crying so much that it took me an hour just to calm down enough to go to sleep.
Those two chapters were about the death of her son, Ben, her and Riley's overwhelming grief & finally, her own death. Ben died by suicide and they were very open and graphic about those details. As a mother, that chapter was one of the most heartbreaking things I have ever read. Honestly, Lisa Marie's life was pretty heartbreaking & tragic. (At least the parts that she told in this memoir was.) I can't imagine going through everything that she went through and not having issues.
If you take out the headline-ready revelations (Lisa Marie had an abortion! She and Michael Jackson actually had sex! Ex-husband Nicholas Cage was wild - wait, that's not much of a revelation), you're left with an extremely sad book about a woman who basically was screwed from the moment she was born to The King of Rock & Roll and his emotionally unavailable child bride. Lisa Marie's daughter, Riley Keough, seems pretty cool, though, and I hope she is able to have at least a semi-normal life.
They should have been much harder on Priscilla.
That's what they do in Europe? He's real sorry though.
