FROM HERE TO THE GREAT UNKNOWN

Sharing a mother’s life and essence in an openhearted, unmediated way.

The title of this book is a lyric from “Where No One Stands Alone,” one of the songs Lisa Marie Presley recorded as a duet with archival tapes of her father, Elvis Presley. Now her daughter, Riley Keough, has done something similar, using material that her mother recorded in the last years of her life, before her death at 54 in 2023. Transcribing and editing the tapes, Keough adds commentary and fills in the blanks, noting in a preface that her mother “was constitutionally incapable of hiding anything from me.” The two voices are printed in different fonts in the book, which works well. Lisa Marie shares powerful memories of her father, who died when she was nine, from wild times in golf carts at Graceland to the day his lifeless body was carried away. Her teenage years were shaped by the hands-off approach of her mother, Priscilla Presley, who dropped her at the Church of Scientology Celebrity Centre to be taken care of. She shares interesting details of her relationships with husbands Danny Keough, Michael Jackson, Nicolas Cage, and Michael Lockwood. The story of her and Jackson falling in love, bonding over the wildly abnormal lives they share, reveals a side to the man rarely seen. The toll taken by the suicide of Keough’s younger brother Ben in 2020 is expressed by both authors; 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.”

A moving portrait of a life lived on the further reaches of the bizarre planet of American celebrity.