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Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough’s ‘From Here to the Great Unknown’ Is a Raw, Thoroughly Engrossing Portrait of Intergenerational Sorrows: Book Review


'From Here to the Great Unknown,' a Lisa Marie Presley memoir completed by Riley Keough, couldn't be more heartbreaking, or more unexpectedly candid.

This new volume, started by Lisa Marie Presley before her 2022 death and completed recently by daughter Riley Keough, falls squarely into the realm of autobio-tragedy — bracingly looking at how depression and addiction issues repeat themselves generationally, with almost none of the sentimentalized overlay you might expect a book of this kind to impose. After her parents divorce in her fourth year of life, Mom is strict and often absent, but in the blissful summers and holidays she spends in Memphis, indulgent Dad lets her commandeer golf carts, summarily fire Graceland staffers and subsist on a diet of nothing but French fries for three days at a time. The effect on Lisa Marie is not hard to foresee, as Riley has to “tell my mom that the second man she loved the most in the world is gone,” but the daughter and sister takes a rare moment in the book to actually say how she’s feeling, describing a grief that anyone who’s been through anything similar will recognize, where it’s “too painful to cry… a terrifying, bottomless pain… I was more physically incapacitated than my parents.”

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