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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Barbara Ellen

From Here to the Great Unknown by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough review – a book built on grief

Lisa Marie Presley as a baby with her parents, Elvis and Priscilla, February 1968
Lisa Marie Presley as a baby with her parents, Elvis and Priscilla, February 1968. Photograph: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

What to expect from Lisa Marie Presley’s memoir? Some sanitised, cagey reminiscences, dutifully studded with anecdotes about her father, Elvis, the king of rock’n’roll, who died aged 42 in 1977? Instead, it’s a warts and all jaw-dropper. The marriages (including Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage). The drugs (Lisa Marie spiralled into opioid addiction after a caesarean section to deliver her twins). And that’s before the revelations about her son Ben Keough’s 2020 suicide (she kept his body on dry ice in her California home for two months). When her actor daughter, Riley Keough (from Daisy Jones & the Six), writes that she wants Lisa Marie to emerge from the pages of the memoir as a “three-dimensional character”, she’s not kidding.

The book is co-authored by Keough from in-depth taped interviews with her mother just before her death aged 54 in 2023 (from cardiac arrest and a small bowel obstruction caused by complications from bariatric surgery). Keough’s own words appear throughout (in a different typeface), especially frequently towards the end.

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