From Here to the Great Unknown

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.

I enjoyed this immensely but I unfortunately felt like so much of it was about the people around Lisa Marie rather than her. Riley did an amazing job but many times it felt like it was her memoir, and many parts Lisa Marie wrote for the beginning felt like they were about her father or sometimes even her mother and that disappointed me

They should have been much harder on Priscilla.

That's what they do in Europe? He's real sorry though.

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.