From Here to the Great Unknown

“My mother told me that she’d thought about trying to fall off her horse to cause a miscarriage. She didn’t want to gain pregnancy weight. She thought that wouldn’t’t be a good look for her as Elvis’s wife. There were so many women after him, all of them beautiful. She wanted his undivided attention. She was so upset that she was pregnant that initially she’d only eat apples and eggs and never gained much weight. I was a pain in her ass immediately and I always felt she didn’t want me.”

Priscilla’s confession that she wanted to abort her daughter and her worries about gaining weight as Elvis’s wife illustrate both the root of Lisa’s feelings of being unlovable and the influence of her father’s celebrity on her life. Before she was even born, the public scrutiny associated with being close to Elvis was defining her life and relationships, introducing The Dangerous Effects of Fame and Living in the Spotlight as a central theme in the text.

“My mom fundamentally felt she was broken, unlovable, not beautiful. There was a profound sense of unworthiness in her, and I could never really figure out why. I’ve spent my whole life trying to work out the answer. My mother was an incredibly complicated person and deeply misunderstood.”

In this passage, Riley describes the insecurities and anxieties that her mother struggled with throughout her life. Lisa struggled to be understood on her own terms, to be seen as something other than just Elvis’s daughter. She was a complex, “three-dimensional” woman but was often flattened by public perception and the media, highlighting the inherent tension between the concepts of celebrity and authenticity.

“And I realized in that moment that all of these phrases I use, and the things I say to my daughter, are the ways my mom spoke to me. She had gotten them directly from her dad. From the South. And all of them are alive in me.”

Riley’s reflections on inherited behaviors in her family emphasize the memoir’s thematic engagement with The Inescapability of Legacy and Family Inheritance. Here, Riley muses on the parts of her grandfather that are alive in her even though she never had the opportunity to meet Elvis. Although she did not meet him directly, she has absorbed parts of him through her mother, and they will continue to live on in her own daughter.

“I was so busy looking at everyone else’s grief that I couldn’t actually have mine yet. I was trying to grieve my dad, but at the same time, I understood he was ‘Elvis Presley.’ I understood his persona and that being Elvis was what he loved doing the most.”

In this passage, Lisa describes the aftermath of Elvis’s death, emphasizing the disconnect between his public persona and personal self. As she watched the public spectacle of the mourners filling past her father’s coffin at Graceland, she struggled to relate this public loss to her private one. As a result, it was difficult for her to process her grief, and she bottled it up instead.

“I was becoming numb to everything. Just another funeral, another loss. Memphis was becoming a place just to go back to for funerals. Enough trauma had happened that it wasn’t even affecting me anymore. Everyone was kind of expecting me to be upset, but nothing was fazing me. There was just so much trauma.”

Just two years after Elvis died, Lisa’s grandfather passed away, followed by her great-grandmother. These traumas stacked on top of one another, and she was unable to process any of her pain. Instead, she became “numb” and dissociated even further, foreshadowing how addiction and substance abuse disorder will impact her as an adult.

“My mom was very strict, in fact. She was never a friend, someone I could talk to. I felt like I was her trophy. She wanted a cotillion for me. I didn’t even know what that was, but she always wanted one. She wanted me to go to finishing school. I felt like she should have gotten a different daughter. It was about how things looked—the way things appeared seemed more important than feelings. My mom would never allow herself to lose control. Everything was all in its place.”

Lisa describes her teenage relationship with her mother as the foundation of her fears of being “used” and “unlovable”—fears that plagued her throughout her life. Many people close to Lisa, including her mother, wanted her to be a certain way and didn’t try to understand and accept who she really was.

“All I wanted to do was drugs—weed and coke mainly. I wasn’t addicted to one particular substance. I liked it all. I wanted to get my hands on anything I could swallow, snort, eat, sniff, you name it. I never ran into heroin, though. Never was in the same room with it, thank God. (That would happen later.) My main purpose in life was just to find a score. I soon settled into a heavy metal phase, dying my hair all black, or bleaching it, and drugs.”

After her father’s death, Lisa struggled to define her own identity—trying on different personas. She dropped out of several schools and heavily used drugs and alcohol. In the context of her father’s substance use disorder, Lisa recognizes that encountering narcotics early in life would have been disastrous for her.

“The first time my mom told me about this betrayal she said it was her first memory of feeling used, the first time she realized people had an agenda with her. She talked about it regularly throughout her life; it was a core trauma for her. It was just one of a series of events from her childhood that came together to build a foundation of distrust in people—a distrust that she never really got past.”

When Lisa was 14, she began dating a 23-year-old actor who eventually betrayed her by selling photos of them together to the press—an event both Riley and Lisa emphasize as a fundamental moment in Lisa’s life. The betrayal of her boyfriend shaped her belief that people wanted to use her for her wealth, fame, and proximity to Elvis.

“But he thought, too, that this little creature at the end of the table had such power and presence, and it was nothing to do with being the child of Elvis Presley. (In fact, they would have zero conversations about Elvis throughout their relationship—he knew that she felt the loss deeply, but she never mentioned it). He knew immediately that she didn’t feel the need to impress anybody—and he also found her unbelievably physically stunning, plus she had an intensity he was drawn to.”

When Lisa began dating Danny, Riley and Ben’s father, he didn’t even know that she was Elvis’s daughter. This grounded their relationship in authentic mutual affection. He loved Lisa for herself, not because of her celebrity or famous father. His recognition of her “power and presence” outside of her family context created a bond between them that lasted throughout Lisa’s life—when she died it was Danny who was by her side.

“The photo was worth three hundred thousand dollars, which in the eighties was an even more gigantic amount of money, the equivalent of almost a million bucks now. It appeared on the cover of People magazine with the tagline, ELVIS’S FIRST GRANDCHILD. HERE SHE IS!”

Just like at Lisa’s birth, the press was there to greet Riley the moment she entered the world. Repeating her mother’s experience, Riley’s existence was immediately defined by the specter of Elvis’s fame, even though he had already been dead for a number of years.

“My mom was really affected by what people wrote about her. She had no siblings to share the burden, nobody who understood what it truly felt like. In a way she was the princess of America and didn’t want to be.

Her reluctance only made the chase more interesting for the press. There were photographers in trees. My dad was always pushing or fighting some paparazzo.

She genuinely tried her whole life to get away from it. And yet she paradoxically fell in love with Michael Jackson.”

From Here to the Great Unknown draws several parallels between Lisa’s relationship with her father and her marriage to Michael Jackson. Here, Riley describes the constant burden of fame on her mother. She was famous simply for being Elvis’s daughter; it was never something she had chosen or wanted, and she always tried to live a normal life. However, when she fell in love with Michael Jackson, her fame skyrocketed and the public scrutiny increased exponentially.

“Both brought with them generational addiction issues and both of their families came up from poverty, too: Vernon had been a sharecropper and carpenter, Joe Jackson a crane operator. And both Michael and my mother’s father knew all too well what it was like to have godlike fame, a fame that seemed to have appeared overnight.”

In this passage, Riley describes Lisa’s connection to Michael Jackson, explicitly naming the similarities between Elvis “the king” and Michael “the king of pop.” Although Lisa had tried for years to shake the specter of her father’s fame, the struggles associated with living in the spotlight were an integral part of her life. Michael could understand this all too well, and the two bonded over their shared history.

“We were very close—he’d tell me everything. Ben and I had the same relationship that my father and his mother had. It was a generational fucking cycle.

Gladys loved my dad so much that she drank herself to death worrying about him. And then my dad had his demons and acted out on them. I have everything in me that wants to do the same thing. And then my son’s got the same genetic makeup—I feel like he’s more genetically me than Danny.

Ben didn’t stand a fucking chance.”

Here, Lisa describes the similarities between Elvis’s relationship with his mother, Lisa’s own relationship with her father, and her relationship with Ben, highlighting the memoir’s perspective on the inescapability of legacy and family inheritance. These extremely close parent-child relationships constituted an important pattern in Lisa’s family. However, combined with substance abuse and mental health conditions, they often ended in tragedy. Lisa emphasizes Ben’s close resemblance to his grandfather and the ways in which he reenacted these family patterns—both of which, she believes, made him particularly vulnerable to the addiction that plagued his family.

“We would climb in the apple trees and the plum trees and the pomegranate trees, until we cracked open a pomegranate and ate the soft insides. My brother’s nanny, Uant, would ring a bell at four o’clock for tea—tea and crumpets and jam, like some colonial British version of her South African upbringing. My mom curated all that for us—it was her version of Graceland.”

Both Lisa and Danny were determined to give their children “magical” childhoods; Lisa cherished the freedom and joy she had been allowed at Graceland and sought to recreate that environment for her own children. The dedication with which Lisa went about creating this perfect life for Riley and Ben suggests the extent to which she continued to live in the past and idealize the years before her father passed away.

“Every time the record company sent it to her for approval it was more countrified, targeting Elvis fans. I remember sitting in her Mercedes, saying, ‘I liked the original version, but I really don’t like this…’ The company was resistant to what she wanted, she was resistant to what they wanted, and that’s how it went.”

Lisa’s attempt at a music career exemplifies her constant battle to be seen as something other than Elvis’s daughter. Her record companies were constantly trying to make her music sound more like her father’s. Like so many other aspects of her life, Lisa struggled to be seen and treated as herself, not merely as an extension of Elvis.

“Most of these staff members were also her best friends. They weren’t thieves, maybe they just got a little lazy. But for my mother it released the dormant feeling that everyone around her had an agenda. Even deeper than that, she thought she was unlovable. The way she would handle these feelings was to exile people, regardless of how big or small the offense.”

Riley highlights the incident in which Lisa fired most of her staff as a key example of the way Lisa’s fears escalated her paranoia that no one except her immediate family could be trusted. Minor indiscretions by members of her staff triggered deep seated feelings of distrust and insecurity in her.

“I’m super sensitive and scared and not secure with who I am. I don’t know who I am—I never really got the chance to uncover my own identity. I didn’t have a family. I didn’t have a childhood, and though some of it was fun, there was also constant trouble.”

Lisa frames her tendency to push people away as a defense mechanism to protect herself from being hurt. She argues her turbulent childhood and adolescence left her sense of identity fragile. Living under public scrutiny from the moment she was born, along with facing a number of traumas early in life, Lisa never had the opportunity to learn about herself or develop a strong sense of self.

“If you don’t have something to keep you focused, or some kind of purpose, it’s hard out there. Life is not easy. Who doesn’t want to be high? Drugs or drinking make you feel great. You have to have something bigger, bigger than that feeling of being high, bigger than that happiness, bigger than that emptiness. If you don’t, you’re in trouble.”

Here, Lisa describes the constant temptation of drugs and alcohol and her struggle to live without it. She suggests that the only way to avoid addiction is to stay “focused” on some bigger purpose, outside of oneself. She links addiction with her tendency to hide from her problems and ignore them instead of processing them—a cycle she attempted to break while grieving her son’s death.

“This became a theme in my family: They would do things behind my back. I was kind of the narc—my mom always said I was too harsh on Ben or too harsh on her, but I think it was simply that I was the only one who wasn’t an addict—so I was the downer.”

This passage reflects Riley’s pattern of defining herself as different from the other members of her family. Throughout her life, Riley argues she was never as “hardcore” as her parents and her brother. She could never party as hard or stay up as late. As Ben and Lisa’s addictions began to worsen, Riley felt increasingly excluded her from the family’s trust.

“Ben Ben was a mama’s boy through and through, and he couldn’t handle his mama being in pain. They were so close—like Elvis and Gladys—one inextricably tied to the rise and fall of the other, and seeing each other in pain was impossibly hard for them. It wrecked him. What had once felt like a perfect childhood to us gave way to what felt like a nightmare to him. Like many in our family, substances were where Ben found relief, and his alcohol addiction got worse.”

Riley describes the knock-on effects that Lisa’s addiction had on her son, reinforcing the parallel between Elvis’s relationship with Lisa and Lisa’s connection with Ben. As her addiction and depression worsened, Ben suffered just as much as his mother. The two were so close that they could not bear to see the other in pain, and Ben began relying on alcohol to escape his “nightmare.”

“We’re told not to cry from the moment we’re born. We spend much of our lives trying to disassociate. When we feel something bad we try to make ourselves feel better, because we are afraid of it. Like anyone, I feel uninspired and indifferent about life, and broken at times. Life can be unbearably hard and cruel. But somehow, the loss of my brother reframed all of those moments for me. Ben made me realize that every little thing matters, every little mundane moment, every flash of joy. All the pain.

The loss of my brother made me understand how two things, maybe more than two things, can be true at the same time. This has been one of the most profound experiences I’ve had. Learning to hold joy and suffering and indifference and hope simultaneously.”

Riley emphasizes the lesson she learned from her brother’s death, arguing that it’s important not to run away from uncomfortable or painful feelings. This perspective represents the opposite of the approach Lisa took to difficult feelings and emotions throughout her life. Rather than “numbing out” as Lisa often did, Riley asserts that one must experience everything, even pain, to its fullest, allowing it to pass through because pain does not negate joy. Although the grief might never fully leave, that doesn’t mean that all possibility for happiness is gone.

“Grief settles. It’s not something you overcome. It’s something that you live with. You adapt to it. Nothing about you is who you were. Nothing about how or what I used to think is important. The truth is that I don’t remember who I was. The other day somebody said, ‘I know you better than anyone,’ and I said, ‘No, you don’t. You don’t have a fucking clue who I am. Because I don’t even know who the fuck I am anymore.’”

In the memoir’s final chapters, Lisa offers her own perspective on grief. Like her daughter, she recognizes that a profound loss never goes away. However, unlike Riley, Lisa feels that she remains at the mercy of her pain, believing it has taken her over and caused her to lose herself.

“What is the point of an autobiography? I was thinking my main objective would be to help other people somehow. Or to shed light on something. Make a difference somewhere, somehow. I think people have gone through some of the same things I have, and maybe they’ll say, ‘That really helped me.’ That would be fulfilling.”

In the last years of her life, Lisa dedicated herself to helping others who had experienced grief and found solace in that mission. She hopes that sharing the story of her memoir will have a similar effect and help those who have experienced struggles similar to her own.