From Here to the Great Unknown

From Here to the Great Unknown is a memoir co-authored by Lisa Marie Presley and her daughter, Riley Keough. The only daughter of Priscilla and Elvis Presley, Lisa grew up at Graceland and was the subject of public scrutiny from the moment she was born. She paints an intimate portrait of her father, revealing the man behind his public persona, and recounts her turbulent adolescence and young adulthood. As the memoir progresses, Riley contributes her own memories and helps to carry her mother’s story forward. Published in 2024, following Lisa’s death in 2023, the memoir examines the challenges of family legacy and inheritance, the risk of living life in the public eye, and the difficulty of coping with pain and loss. 

This guide references the 2024 Penguin Random House Kindle edition of the text.

Content Warning: From Here to the Great Unknown and this guide make repeated references to addiction, sexual assault, abortion, and suicide.

Summary

The first chapters of From Here to the Great Unknown detail Lisa Marie Presley’s early life at Graceland. Her childhood bedroom was upstairs, right next door to her father’s suite, giving her unrivaled one-on-one access to Elvis. Father and daughter were completely devoted to one another, and Lisa loved Elvis more than anything. Lisa’s parents divorced when she was four, and she moved to California with her mother. She spent summers and holidays in Memphis, where she was permitted to run wild, riding golf carts around the property with her friends and taunting the crowds of fans that always gathered around the estate’s gates. However, Elvis was also prone to sudden rages; Lisa sometimes noticed him swaying or falling unexpectedly, and she often worried about her father dying.

Elvis passed away when Lisa was nine years old, and she felt as if the world had ended. She watched the public spectacle of his fans’ grief and struggled to find room for the personal loss of her father. As a result, she never properly processed the loss and continued to struggle with her grief throughout her life. After Elvis died, Lisa returned to California with her mother and entered a rocky adolescence. She failed or dropped out of a number of schools and began drinking heavily and using drugs. She had the same desire to “numb out” that her father had struggled with and tried anything she “could swallow, snort, eat, sniff” (80). By the time she was 14, Lisa was dating a 23-year-old actor. Their rocky relationship lasted over two years and finally ended when he sold photos of them together to the press. Lisa considers this her “first big betrayal.” Ever since she was a child, she’d struggled with feelings of self-doubt and insecurity. She often felt “used” and worried that “people had an agenda with her” (94) and only wanted to be close to her because of her relation to Elvis. Her first boyfriend’s betrayal solidified these fears in her mind.

When Lisa was 17, she met Danny Keough, a 21-year-old bass player. The two dated on and off for a number of years and finally got married when Lisa became pregnant with their first child. Lisa’s mother disapproved of Danny—she made several attempts to break up the impending marriage and encouraged Lisa to have an abortion. Nevertheless, Lisa and Danny persisted and became parents to their daughter, Riley. Lisa loved being a mother, and the couple had another child, Ben, a few years later. After Ben was born, Lisa began taking vocal lessons and recorded a demo tape that would change her and her family’s lives.

A number of important people in the industry contacted Lisa about her demo tape, including Michael Jackson. Lisa “didn’t want to become someone else’s project” (132), but she agreed to meet with Michael. The two had met briefly at a Jackson 5 concert when Lisa was a child. She didn’t remember the meeting, but Michael claimed to have been trying to reconnect with Lisa and date her for years. The two “clicked” immediately and began to develop an intimate friendship. Initially, the relationship was completely platonic, even though Lisa often traveled to visit Michael. Eventually, however, Michael confessed his feelings for her, and Lisa divorced Danny to marry Michael. The relationship caused her fame to grow “exponentially.” The couple had to travel with a team of bodyguards, and the paparazzi were inescapable. The relationship began to suffer as Michael’s substance abuse disorder worsened. Lisa began to worry that he was using her for the “novelty” of being with Elvis’s daughter, and she divorced him.

After the divorce, Lisa began suffering from severe panic attacks and moved to Florida to escape the paparazzi. Danny came to help her care for the children, and remained there until she recovered. The family moved back to California, where Lisa bought a large house outside of Los Angeles and dedicated the next decade to her children. She and Danny wanted Riley and Ben to have a “magical” childhood, and Lisa turned their California home into her version of Graceland. Riley and Ben spent hours roaming free and playing outside. The house was always full of friends, family, and beloved staff, creating a “dreamlike communal life” in which the children “were never alone” (168).

In 2006, Lisa married for a fourth time. She “desperately” wanted another chance at motherhood and underwent in-vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments to become pregnant with twins. She gave birth to two girls in 2008. Riley loved her baby sisters, and the family came together to take care of them. Lisa decided to create an idyllic childhood for the twins by purchasing a house in the English countryside. However, her family history of addiction “showed up and burned everything down” (199). When Lisa learned that some of her employees were getting “a little lazy” and overspending on her company credit cards, her old feelings of distrust and self-doubt began to resurface. One by one, she fired her whole staff, some of whom were close family friends. She moved to England with her husband and twin daughters and found herself suddenly isolated. Unbeknownst to the rest of the family, Lisa had started abusing the opioids she was prescribed after her caesarean section (C-section) birth, and she developed a substance use disorder. She was mixing pills, alcohol, and cocaine and was finally hospitalized with heart failure. She attended the court-mandated rehab but fell into a deep depression. The family that had once been so joyous was plunged into “darkness” by the “heavy and hopeless” tone that Lisa, “the fiercest of family leaders,” had set (231). No one was more affected by this dark mood than Riley’s brother Ben. Ben and Lisa had always been incredibly close. Their relationship mirrored the “deep soul bond” that Lisa shared with Elvis and Elvis had shared with his own mother. Watching Lisa suffer was difficult for Ben, and he also developed a substance use disorder.

One night at a party, Ben went upstairs “to get a beer” and shot himself in the head (235). The tragedy rocked the whole family. Ben was “an angel,” universally loved, and his death felt like “a colossal error.” COVID-19 lockdown had just been instituted, and the family spent months in quarantine processing their loss together. Riley knew from the moment of her brother’s death that losing Ben would “be the end of her [mother’s] life” (241). However, Lisa tried to live in a way that would honor her son’s memory and continued to be there for her other children. She was in recovery from addiction, connected with other parents who had lost children, and wrote about her experience with grief. Nevertheless, her heart was broken, and her health began to deteriorate.

Throughout 2022, Lisa was in and out of the hospital. By early 2023, Riley noticed “a sadness” and a “sense of resignation” about her mother that worried her (273). On January 12, 2023, Lisa texted Danny, complaining of stomach pain and asking him to bring her Tums. By the time he arrived, she was on the floor after suffering an apparent heart attack. She was rushed to the hospital, where she died a few hours later. Lisa’s service was held at Graceland, and she was laid to rest beside her father and son.