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

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.

First, though, we’re transported to Presley’s childhood as the overindulged princess of the Memphis, Tennessee mansion Graceland, with a hamburger-shaped bed and a plane named after her. A daddy’s girl, even after Elvis’s divorce from her mother, Priscilla, she would ride around the grounds in her own golf cart and threaten to get staff sacked.

Elvis looms large in these passages: taking his daughter on a rollercoaster with a gun in a holster; shooting snakes in the grounds. He was a long-term prescription drug addict and Lisa Marie would sometimes find him passed out on the floor. She watched Elvis carried out of Graceland the day he died: “I saw his head, I saw his body, I saw his pyjamas, and I saw his socks at the bottom of the gurney.” She was nine years old.

What would that do to a child? In subsequent years, she responded with the standard teenage cocktail of cynicism and rebellion: any drugs, bar heroin (“anything I could swallow, snort, eat, sniff”); terrible boyfriends, one of whom orchestrated a paparazzi set-up. She had howling insecurities as the daughter of the “king”. When Presley eventually made music, she resisted pressure to sound like her father.

Nor did she feel close to her mother. Elvis met Priscilla when she was 14 (“it was a different time”, writes Lisa Marie, brusquely noting they didn’t have sex until her mother was 18). Priscilla springs from these pages like some southern belle ice queen. After Elvis’s death: “It was a one-two punch: he’s dead and I’m stuck with her.” When they both became Scientologists, Lisa Marie felt Priscilla was “dumping” her there. Later there was a truce, but you don’t sense a real reconciliation: “People think I’m a bitch because unfortunately I have my mom’s chilly thing.”

Her healthiest relationship was with Riley and Ben’s father (Danny Keough), and they remained lifelong friends. While the Cage union is dealt with relatively swiftly and politely, the mid-90s marriage to Jackson gets the full candid treatment. She brushes aside the child molestation accusations (“I never saw a goddamn thing like that. I personally would’ve killed him if I had”). He told her he was a virgin (“He said Madonna had tried to hook up with him once, too, but nothing happened”) and was interested in her sexually (“He said: ‘I’m not waiting!’”). Later, Presley would start to doubt Jackson, who also had drug problems and his own anaesthetist. She also suspected he would dump her if she had his much-wanted children: “He was very controlling and calculating.”

There is lots more going on too, as she succumbs to opioids, drifting in and out of rehab. But it’s the passages about her son’s body that make you wonder if you’re hallucinating (“I think it would scare the living fucking piss out of anybody else to have their son there like that. But not me”) – especially when she shows a tattooist the tattoo she wants by displaying it on Ben’s dead hand.

Reading this, an uneasy thought occurs. Presley may have been happy to do the tapes, but would she have wanted it all published? We’ll never know. Certainly, it’s clear that Presley was nothing if not radically honest. It’s also striking how Keough seems to almost plead with the reader to understand and love her mother as much as she does. Ultimately, this is a book built on grief: Lisa Marie Presley’s for her father and son, but also a daughter’s for her mother.

• From Here to the Great Unknown by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough is published by Pan Macmillan (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply