From Here to the Great Unknown Is a Presley-Family Therapy Session

“It’s difficult to go about your day without hearing an Elvis song out in the world,” Riley Keough writes in her new memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, which she co-authored with her late mother, Lisa Marie Presley. That may sound like an obvious statement, but it’s a true one: For decades, the tragedy and mythology of rock-and-roll legend Elvis Presley — what he ate, who he loved, what he was like — have felt like they belonged to his fans just as much as they did the Presley family. When Lisa Marie Presley died in the winter of 2023, she’d last been publicly seen at the Golden Globes with her children, there to promote Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. A few days later, she was gone.

From Here to the Great Unknown tells Lisa Marie’s story through two voices: her own and that of Keough, who was helping her mother go through tapes and write the memoir at the time of her death. Keough weaves both voices together in a dual narrative demarcated by type: Lisa Marie’s words are in a serif font, and her own are sans serif. (It’s a little unusual at first, though easy to understand in context.) What emerges is less of a retelling of Presley’s life — though there is plenty of that — and more of a conversation between mother and daughter about parents and children, what we expect of those who raise us and what they impart to us when they leave.

The memoir lays out an introspective therapy session between mother and daughter, something more intimate than the usual Presley-industrial complex offerings. Stories narrated regaled by Lisa Marie, spoken aloud into tapes, now have an audience. When Presley details the sexual abuse she allegedly endured from Priscilla Presley’s boyfriend Michael Edwards, Keough allows the story to stand in full before writing: “Hearing my mother describe these incidents broke my heart. I know what happened was one of her deepest childhood traumas but I don’t think she — or any of us who knew her — fully considered how it may have contributed to some of the fundamental feelings she carried, like shame and self-hatred.”

Having Keough’s response contextualizes her mother’s pain: Lisa Marie is telling this story to not just us but those closest to her. In the abstract, writing a book can feel like shouting into a void, but in the case of From Here to the Great Unknown, Keough is always listening on the other side. Sometimes, she’s there to correct the record: When Lisa Marie suggests that she got pregnant with Keough by her then-boyfriend Danny Keough, she says she didn’t “mean to” trap him with a baby. Keough herself writes: “My mom subsequently told me every detail of timing her ovulation for that moment in Aruba. And she absolutely meant to trap my dad.” Keough’s responses are rarely, if ever, judgmental; she’s more keen to explain that this is just the person her mother was, a reflection of her own upbringing. The Presleys and Keoughs exist within their own context. For all that they’ve been subject to tabloid-magazine covers and public speculation, these are the people who’ve grappled with these myths hanging over their heads.

The early stretches of the memoir are told in detailed ramblings, but as the chronology progresses, Lisa Marie’s dispatches grow shorter and shorter. “I don’t know who I am,” Presley writes. “I never really got the chance to uncover my own identity. I didn’t have a family. I didn’t have a childhood, and though some of it was fun, there was also constant trouble.” Although the last 15 years of her life were marked by addiction and grief — Lisa Marie’s only son, and Keough’s younger brother, Ben, died in 2020 — what Keough proves through her writing is that Lisa Marie, though she did not know it, did have a family. She did have her own identity. “Where there are gaps in her story, I fill them in,” Keough writes. Even when things spiraled out, there was room for a family vacation to Hawaii or a trip to England to catch up with friends. “Despite all this love she had inside her, and all her effort to live, we could all see it. We could all feel it coming,” Keough notes. The final years of Lisa Marie’s life feel — through both their writings — like a horrible inevitability. 

The book concludes at Graceland, the Memphis estate and museum where Elvis lived, where both Lisa Marie and her son, Ben, are buried along with her father. In May 2024, Keough fought against Graceland’s foreclosure and won, though she’s still seeking control of the estate after a loan Lisa Marie took out on the property was never paid back. Despite the ongoing struggle to keep Graceland with the Presley family, much of the press for From Here to the Great Unknown has been centered there. Keough sat down with Oprah Winfrey, both clad in white, in Elvis’s white living room, and the estate itself is selling an exclusive copy with a signed lithograph from Keough. With the book now out in the world, the story of the Presley family goes back to the people — to consume, to speculate about, to admonish or worship — but the dialogue between Presley and Keough, as a daughter finds her mother in transcription, stays bound between its covers, going back and forth until the end.