From Here to the Great Unknown
By: Lisa Marie Presley & Riley Keough
Published Year: 2024
Publisher: Random House
Pages: 204
Summary (Provided by Goodreads): 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 grieved.
Riley got the tapes that her mother had recorded for the book, laid 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 towards 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 shared 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.
First Impressions
The cover is really cool. It definitely caught my eye. However, I have never been an Elvis fan so didn’t have any intention of reading this one. Then it ended up on the list of a ton of people as one of their favorite reads of the year or even their favorite audiobook of the year, so I decided to give it a shot.
What I thought
Wow. Absolutely wow.
Lisa Marie passed away before she could write her memoir. She had planned to finally write one with her daughter, but shortly after they made that decision, she died. Luckily, over the years, people had wanted her to write a memoir so she had multiple interviews and recordings of ideas and stories for her memoir. Riley took those tapes and stories and helped to both transcribe the stories as well as add to them. The audiobook is narrated by Julia Roberts reading as Lisa Marie and Riley, reading the parts of her own stories that she added for portions that her mother didn’t cover.
Each chapter also starts and ends with a snippet directly from Lisa Marie’s audio recordings. Even if you’re not normally an audiobook reader, I highly recommend you listen to this one. It’s really cool to hear Lisa Marie’s recordings and I think Julia Roberts does a fabulous job. Plus it made it really cool to hear Riley adding in her own portions and commentary.
Lisa Marie’s life is fascinating and traumatic. The stories she told about her childhood and being in the public eye were wild. It also shed so much light as to why she and Michael Jackson were drawn to one another. This might just be the book to get me back into celebrity memoirs.
I don’t normally do trigger warnings, but I was caught off guard by a few things. There is a lot of discussion about addiction, which I expected. There also is an entire chapter in which Riley talks about how her brother committed suicide and the following grief that she and her mother experienced. I did end up skipping a lot of the final chapter as that was something I was unable to read.
This might end up being one of my favorite books of the year. I learned so much and was riveted from start to finish. The way the story was told was unique and creative. Even if you are not an Elvis fan, I highly recommend picking this up. Like I said, I do specifically recommend it as an audiobook, but I’m sure it’s just as fascinating in physical form.