From Here To The Great Unknown

What does it take to tell the truth about someone the world thinks it already knows—and what changes in you when you try? In From Here to the Great Unknown, Lisa Marie Presley and her daughter Riley Keough argue—across time, tape, and memory—that a life lived under myth can still be rendered in three dimensions. Lisa contends that behind the bright glare of Elvis, and later Michael Jackson, lay a ferocious mother, a searching artist, and a woman shaped by early awe, sudden loss, late addiction, and love that never gave up. Riley, who finishes the book after Lisa’s death, insists that to understand Lisa you must hold opposites at once: glamour and grit, agency and abandonment, tenderness and volcanic temper, childlike wonder and adult reckoning.

This memoir is a duet—Lisa’s raw, spoken recollections (drawn from recorded interviews) interlaced with Riley’s witness and patchwork of the missing late chapters. The result isn’t a celebrity recap; it’s a map of intergenerational forces flowing from Graceland’s upstairs sanctuary to a Calabasas living room where a daughter changes a grandchild’s diaper as grief howls outside. The story asks you to consider how families transmit power and pain, and how you might metabolize both in your own life.

What the book claims

At its core, the book claims that legacies are living organisms. Lisa’s childhood—fueled by late-night golf carts, Pomeranians stealing bacon, and a father whose moods could make the weather—formed an unshakeable devotion and an early apprenticeship in charisma. Elvis’s death at her age nine became the primal wound and template for grief: public spectacle, private silence, and a lifelong sense that the center can vanish in an instant. From there, love and longing braided through rebellious years (Scientology, the Apple school, Ojai), harrowing abuse by a stepfather figure, two great romances (Danny Keough and Michael Jackson), the decade-long joy of raising Riley and Ben inside a buzzing Hidden Hills compound, a music career fought for on her own terms, and—arriving late—an opioid addiction that shadowed her final chapter. Riley argues the only way to tell it truly is to hold compassion, anger, and context in the same hand.

How the book is structured

You move through vivid set pieces: “Upstairs at Graceland” (Lisa’s private sanctuary with Elvis); “He’s Gone” (the day Elvis died and what public mourning does to a child); “The Wall” (teenage rebellion, boarding schools, Scientology’s pull and containment); “There’s a Bluebird in My Heart” (meeting Danny Keough, motherhood that saves her); “Mimi” (loving Michael Jackson for his unguarded, private self while fearing the machinery around him); “Ten Years” (the happiest period—motherhood, friends-as-family, tours, rituals); “The Bus from Nashville to L.A.” (late addiction, a heart in crisis, the attempt at reboot); “Ben Ben” (Riley’s shattering account of her brother’s suicide and the family’s grief pod); and “Meditation Garden” (Lisa’s grandmotherhood, last days, and burial beside Elvis and Ben).

Why this matters to you

If you’ve ever inherited a story—of greatness, addiction, anger, or grief—this book shows how to carry it without letting it crush you. Lisa and Riley model a kind of double-seeing you can practice: honor what was magical (the vortex at Graceland, the way Elvis sang her to sleep with a basset hound puppet) and confront what was devastating (finding him facedown in the bathroom, being groomed and hit by a mother’s boyfriend, the slow logic of pills). They also model how to love someone you’ve divorced (Lisa and Danny as lifelong allies) and how to mother when your heart is in shards (Lisa’s ritual lullabies, tours built around her kids, and—at the end—grief circles she ran for bereaved parents).

Guiding premise

A myth can be gorgeous and also incomplete; a person can be broken and also radiant. The work of a daughter is to finish the portrait—with tenderness and the whole truth.

What you’ll learn in this summary

You’ll see how upstairs rooms—literal and psychological—shape a life, and how fame’s perimeter (fans in trees, security at gates) trains children to scan for danger and adore spectacle. You’ll watch addiction arrive not in adolescence but after twins and a C-section, confirming what physicians like Gabor Maté note about painkillers as portals for old pain (context: In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts). You’ll learn why Lisa called Danny her “different kind” of soulmate, and how that pact protected Riley and Ben even through divorce. You’ll step into the moral fog around Michael Jackson—where Lisa insists on his innocence as she experienced it, yet names the secrecy, Demerol, and control that doomed their marriage (compare to Janice Erlbaum’s frankness in Girlbomb about loving flawed men while saving yourself).

Finally, you’ll sit with Riley in the rawest rooms: keeping Ben’s body at home on dry ice so their goodbyes weren’t rushed; getting matching tattoos in the very script he’d inked on his own skin; finding vocabulary for a grief that doesn’t lessen but changes shape (echoing Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking). Through all of it, you’ll see how a family crafts meaning from chaos—rituals, songs, jokes, fairy gardens—so you can consider your own.

Lisa’s earliest universe is one floor above the tourists. The upstairs at Graceland—Elvis’s suite and her own bedroom—was a private city-state with a single sovereign. If the massive black-and-gold doors were open, she tiptoed past; if they were closed, he slept. There, a basset hound puppet sang “Can’t Help Falling in Love” to apologize for a spanking after a motorbike burn. There, her hamburger-shaped bed anchored a world where a father’s laugh could change the weather and a shouted Southern “goddamn!” was both thunderclap and punch line. For you, it’s a case study in how intimacy and intensity fuse inside the homes of the very famous.

The rules of a kingdom

Elvis ran Graceland like a benevolent sheriff—closing pet stores at night so his daughter and entourage could pick animals; convening convoys of golf carts; conducting target practice in a backyard shed that once exploded into fireworks. He adored mischief. He’d shut down Memphis’s Libertyland amusement park so Lisa could ride the Zippin Pippin alongside his ever-present sidearm. But his devotion had an undertow: Lisa learned to read his baritone for storms. When he was out of water in a Tahoe suite, furniture flew off a balcony until she brought him four bottles and restored the peace.

(Note: Psychologists often call this “hypervigilance by love”—children of mercurial caregivers become world-class barometers.)

A child’s work: earn delight, avert doom

Lisa’s north star was her father’s laugh. She mimicked fans calling “Alvis!” in the driveway; she asked him, deadpan, “How much money do you have?”—jokes that dissolved him. She believed, as many children do, that her joy could hold a parent together. When he said “I can’t sneeze,” she sprinted down the hall to witness the triumph when he finally did. And if she hurt herself? Devastation wasn’t the pain; it was his disappointed “Why’d you go and hurt yourself?”—proof that love and safety were inseparable in her nervous system.

Graceland as vortex

To Lisa and, later, to Riley, Graceland wasn’t kitsch. It was a charged field. Elvis’s books upstairs—Gibran, Be Here Now, Bibles marked “Amen!”—revealed a young man’s ragged longing for meaning. The Jungle Room’s shag and the poolroom’s upholstered ceiling gave children caves for hide-and-seek with pool cues as spears. At night, coyotes and magnolias made the air itself feel Southern and alive. Riley describes it like Sedona or Jerusalem—one of the world’s strange energetic hotspots. That sense of sacred leakage is why Lisa would later return in her worst hours to sleep in her father’s bed.

Fans in trees and a child’s boundary work

The fence line teemed: watchers on church land, climbers in branches, cameras pressed through gates. Lisa taunted them from her golf cart, took their cameras for twenty dollars, and sometimes hurled the cameras into the bushes. It’s both bratty and brilliant—an eight-year-old exerting control over a boundary the adults couldn’t hold. Later, when Riley watches older fans sob at candlelight vigils, she notices how her mother surrenders into strangers’ arms—as if borrowing a parent for a second—and understands those blurred lines started early.

Southern lineage and language

The oral inheritance is thick: Elvis replaces L’s with Y’s—“Yisa”—and Riley catches herself singing “shortnin’ bread” to her daughter Tupelo decades later. Aunt Delta curses out tourists in a bathrobe, Pomeranian in tow, while brandishing an epic middle finger. Graceland feeds a tribe: four cooks on shifts, catfish and hush puppies, banana pudding, and a kitchen that never sleeps. When a famous neighbor like Billy Idol flies off a golf cart, the laughter is instant and familial. The whole scene reads like Flannery O’Connor with amps—dark humor, holy chaos, and endless food.

Key takeaway

If your childhood taught you to scan for storms and manufacture joy, you likely still do both as an adult. Naming the skill—and its cost—is the first step toward choosing when to use it.

By the time Elvis dies, you understand why Lisa can’t yet grieve out loud: upstairs taught her that the sacred must be guarded, and love must be kept humming. That’s what her little upstairs nation required—and what she will spend the rest of her life unlearning and tenderly remaking.

Lisa is nine, watching Brian’s Song on her hamburger bed, when a premonition jolts her. Minutes later she finds her father facedown in his palatial bathroom, the towel bar ripped from the wall. The scene turns cinematic and slow: a stretcher clatters down the stairs; she sees socks and pajama legs, not his face; her grandfather’s animal wail signals the instant the world splits in two. This is the blueprint of grief that will repeat for forty-five years, through other losses and, finally, her own death. For you, it’s a primer on how a child metabolizes catastrophe inside a house built for spectacle.

Public grief, private freeze

The living room becomes a public viewing. Thousands file past the casket; ambulances cart away fainting fans. Lisa sits on the stairs for hours, eyes on their sorrow, curating herself into stillness. When she finally approaches the open casket, she whispers questions no adult can answer and touches his face and hand—ritual, tenderness, and the last chance to father her father. Then she returns to her room to grieve alone.

(Compare the “freeze” with Joan Didion’s observation that grief scrambles time and makes magic of ordinary acts—both women hold onto domestic gestures as if they can rewind the tape.)

Aftershocks: exile and adaptation

The house turns into scavenger hunt mayhem; artifacts vanish to future auctions before he’s pronounced dead. Lisa’s mother arrives and scolds her for circling the lawn on a golf cart in plain view of tabloid cameras. It feels like exile—Graceland is daddy-land—and now her life is a shuttle between Memphis ritual and Los Angeles polish. She keeps her watch on Memphis time. At Rancho Oso camp, she sobs in sunlit pools when an Elvis song sneaks onto the radio—evidence that grief tattoos the body, not just the mind.

Dream visitations and time travel

Twice a year for over a decade, Elvis visits her dreams. He sits in his chair in her room, solid as ever, until she cries out to warn him about his coming death. His answer—“Darlin’, it’s already happened”—is the sentence she will finally accept in adulthood. The dreams stop when her son is born in 1992, as if the lineage passes from night to morning, from father to boy.

A grief that repeats—and trains

Funerals keep coming: Vernon in ’79, great-grandmother Minnie Mae soon after. Lisa becomes numb and irreverent, even touching stitches in her grandfather’s face—a disturbing snapshot of how too many deaths can train a child to dissociate. Later, as a mother, Riley will experience something similar: when her brother dies in 2020, words won’t form in her mouth for two weeks. The lineage of unspeakable grief persists—and so do the rituals that hold it: sleeping in Elvis’s bed during home tours, singing lullabies to children that Elvis once sang to Lisa.

What this teaches you

Children in famous families learn two languages at once: the family dialect and the press release. Lisa’s capacity to perform calm beside the casket let the world have its grief while she hid her own. As an adult, she will reverse the flow—running grief groups for bereaved parents at her house and writing an op-ed that says plainly, “This doesn’t lessen.” You may recognize this reversal in your own life: the coping stance that saved you becomes the tool you must set down to heal.

Practice for readers

Name your first template for grief (a house, a song, a stairwell, a casket). Then design one new ritual you control now (a letter, a bench, a candle) to update that template with the adult you’ve become.

When Riley later writes, “We laid her to rest beside her father,” she completes a circle that began on those stairs. The child watching a country cry learns, at last, how to lead a family’s mourning without disappearing inside it.

After Elvis’s death, Lisa ricochets between craving containment and rejecting it. Scientology offers structure and a language for pain (“we are spirits, not merely bodies”), but teenage Lisa is also the girl who flips off authority, dyes her hair black, and treats Pink Floyd’s The Wall like scripture. Boarding schools in Ojai and Los Feliz provide new tribes—and new drugs. This chapter charts how a girl trains herself to survive in systems that promise safety but flirt with danger.

Scientology as scaffolding—and a proxy family

Brought in as a preteen, Lisa finds relief in auditing and strictly bounded ethics rooms. She likes the clarity and the attention. Later, when she spirals at the Celebrity Centre—mirror off the wall, four-day coke bender—she crawls downstairs and asks for help. They move her to a palatial suite…with rules. It works for a while. When her mother tries to drag her back home, Lisa negotiates her own return to the Centre like a union rep at a Jack in the Box: a room, freedom, study. Then staff assign her to care for a heroin-addicted young mom—service as sobriety. For you, it’s a reminder that purpose can mimic medicine.

Abuse where there should’ve been refuge

The rawest pages in this stretch detail Michael Edwards, Priscilla’s partner for six years. Drunk, dramatic, violent—he flips a dinner plate against a wall for an undercooked chicken—and, in the night, kneels at Lisa’s bedside. He touches and spanks her under the guise of “teaching” her what men will do later, demanding she not look at him; she shows bruises and is asked what she did to cause them. Apologies come, and she forgives. Then it happens again. The terror in the Virgin Islands—Lisa leaping on his back to defend her mother; the elevator chase—reads like a thriller. It’s also an origin story for Lisa’s lifelong protectiveness and volcanic lines in the sand.

Rebellion as identity lab

In Ojai, Lisa tries on selves like coats: hippie, punk, funk rock, heavy metal—always with drugs handy but heroin absent (for now). She blows off PE, loathes algebra, fails on purpose so boarding schools won’t take her. She keeps getting campused, yet stays because her home life is worse. The teen shorthand here feels familiar if you’ve read Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club: bravado on the surface, a vigilant heart underneath.

The calculus of control

Lisa becomes a master boundary negotiator. Stopped at Pensacola for sneaking out, she dodges her mother’s reach, punches herself for dramatic effect in a car, and later refuses a rehab that isn’t on her terms. When she does accept help, it’s because she can “drive someone else to sobriety.” The lesson for you: many survivors accept containment only when they are also given agency. Any healing plan that treats autonomy as contraband is likely to fail.

Reader reflection

Ask where you still confuse control with safety. Then ask what forms of agency—service, creative work, boundaries—you need to accept care without feeling erased.

By the time she meets Danny Keough, Lisa has both the street instincts of a kid who’s dodged danger and the tenderness of a daughter who still wants to be sung to sleep. That combination will build a family that survives almost everything.

When Lisa meets twenty-one-year-old bassist Danny Keough at the Scientology rose garden café, she reads him as cocky and “not boyfriend material.” He reads her as aloof and magnetic—and says the verbal swordplay hooks him. Their chemistry is the book’s steadiest frequency: messy, human, and enduring. If you want a portrait of divorce as devotion, start here.

A love that outlived its form

They break up; she obsesses for two years; they reunite; she becomes pregnant and, racked with regret after an abortion she calls “the stupidest thing I ever did,” she meticulously plans conception in Aruba. Lisa admits she “trapped” him—and then says she didn’t care: she knew in her bones these were the children she was meant to have with this man. Riley arrives (her People magazine debut reads “ELVIS’S FIRST GRANDCHILD”), then Ben. The couple’s finances are normal—used Toyota Supra, odd jobs, roommates—and life feels almost ordinary until the paparazzi and death threats force gates and guards.

Co-parenting as covenant

Even after their divorce (which Danny files to free Lisa to marry Michael Jackson), they become the rare pair who never weaponize children. He lives in the guesthouse; they spend holidays together; Riley watches her parents dance in Hawaii, pirates reunited, as her dad ends the night naked, pleased as champagne. When Lisa’s new relationships implode, Danny returns without complaint—once with a black eye, orange hair, and a tattoo after wandering Mexico and Italy through his own heartbreak. Decades later, he will be the last person with Lisa as she dies. This is that “different kind” of soulmate Lisa names: the person who stays, no matter the costume change.

Parenting as performance of love

The decade after Michael Jackson is their golden era. At Hidden Hills, the property thrums: goats and peacocks, snakes in tubs, a six-hundred-year-old oak with a swing, karaoke in Kyoto, lullabies every night where Lisa lists every person, pet, and invisible fairy who loves you until you fall asleep. Friends fill every guesthouse; breakfast is tea and jam with a South African nanny, Uant; afternoons are golf carts and pomegranate orchards; evenings are piano sing-alongs with a crowd of twenty-five. Lisa tours with her band and pulls Riley and Ben on the bus—Cracker Barrels, sound checks, Waffle Houses, post-show greenroom hugs. It’s messy, glorious, and exactly the antidote to the upstairs freeze of her childhood.

The creative struggle

Lisa fights to make her own music in the shadow of Elvis. Labels nudge her toward country gloss for Elvis fans; she prefers darker fibers (listen to “Lights Out,” “When You Go,” and the Ramones cover “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow”). She avoids singing Elvis songs—except for rare memorial duets for fans at Graceland anniversaries. Riley remembers her in the Mercedes, blasting rough mixes for feedback, wanting to be taken seriously as a songwriter. (Compare to Patti Scialfa’s slow-burn solo path beside Springsteen; women artist-wives often lug invisible weights to be heard.)

Co‑parenting principle

You don’t have to be forever-married to be forever-allied. Decide early that “our kids never see us as enemies,” then act the part across decades.

If you’re looking for a template to love someone beyond the contract term, Lisa and Danny offer one: be useful, be kind, tell the truth, and show up with water—even when you are drenched yourself.

Lisa meets Michael Jackson in 1993 not as a pop icon but as a lonely insomniac with a goofy movie habit. In Las Vegas, they stay up all night watching Jaws and talking childhoods. He is subdued and kind, she says; his high-pitched public voice is a mask. He confides; she doesn’t judge. The connection is electric. He asks her to marry him in the dark—no entourage, no press plan. What follows is a marriage that reveals the friction points between private tenderness and industrial-scale fame.

A private man who needed a public ally

The molestation accusations explode; Michael disappears. Lisa becomes one of the few who know where he is, supportive by phone from Switzerland to L.A. They marry in the Dominican Republic and hide out in rented houses and a small Orlando home where they do laundry and walk to Disney alone. He moves into Hidden Hills, sings Bart Simpson’s birthday song to Lisa and “You Are Not Alone” to Riley, sometimes with a chimp in tow. On Good Morning America with Diane Sawyer, Lisa defends him forcefully and is later sued by the accuser’s father for violating a confidentiality clause Michael signed (she wins). She says, unequivocally, that she never saw anything that suggested he harmed children.

The fault lines

From the beginning, kids are the sticking point. Michael wants them immediately, and to raise them without a “mother influence.” Lisa senses she would be used for pregnancy and discarded. She bristles at control—secret meetings, icing her out for days, surprise public kisses at the VMAs that make her wonder if she was a prop. She spots drug use patterns—Demerol shots “for the scalp injury” and a personal anesthesiologist. In New York, she confronts the doctor and offers to take Michael to rehab. He sends her home. She files for divorce first, advised that he plans to file (he didn’t). Three months after their divorce, he marries Debbie Rowe.

Nuance over narrative

The memoir holds two truths: Lisa loved the unguarded Michael, believed in his innocence as she experienced it, and could not abide the control and drugs. It’s a rare refusal to flatten a complicated man into a verdict. (Readers of Sheila Weller’s Girls Like Us will recognize this refusal; complex men in pop histories often get either hagiography or cancellation. Lisa writes a third way: fierce love, firm boundary.)

Aftermath and omens

They continue a back-and-forth for years; she attends his last concert in South Africa. In their final call, he tells her, “Everybody around me wants to kill me.” After his death, Lisa sits with his coffin for hours—just as she did with Elvis. She tells Oprah he feared dying like her father. The symmetry is brutal: two gods felled by drugs, two caskets kept company by the same woman, two myths that blurred the man beneath.

Lesson for readers

You can love someone’s core and reject the system that surrounds—and devours—them. The courage is in saying both aloud.

If you’re wrestling with a relationship that was half sanctuary, half snare, Lisa’s account gives language that honors your experience without denying the harm. She models how to remember softness without erasing the hard edges that cut you free.

After the Jackson maelstrom, Lisa engineers a decade of near-domestic bliss. Hidden Hills becomes her compatible version of Graceland: five acres of orchards, goats, peacocks, great horned owls, and a swing that sends you skimming sky. Every room is full—assistants, a holistic doctor, friends-turned-family, and, always, Danny. Holidays are maximalist; birthdays mean renting Magic Mountain to ride Colossus until you turn green; Sundays at Nana’s in Brentwood bring burnt baked potatoes and Push Pops. If upstairs at Graceland trained Lisa to guard joy, Hidden Hills trains her to manufacture it on demand, for everyone.

Motherhood as vocation

Lisa’s maternal instincts are ferocious and specific. She sings custom lullabies that name every beloved creature. She lets Riley ditch school to get frozen yogurt or go toy shopping; she prioritizes wonder over worksheets—ancient constellations over algebra. She institutionalizes joy: Santa sprints through the yard on Christmas Eve; fairy gardens produce Polly Pockets in the morning. When she later has twins, she dreams their personalities before meeting them: Harper delicate and steel-strong; Finley sassy and sweet. She is right.

Art in the house of myth

Music remains both calling and combat sport. Label execs push Elvis-adjacent sonic choices; Lisa resists; tours become her happy place because the energy exchange with fans makes the songs matter in real time. Riley rides the bus, watches soundchecks, eats at Waffle House. Backstage, Lisa hosts fans who say her dark songs kept them alive—proof, to her, that telling the hard truth can be service. (Context: This echoes Cheryl Strayed’s claim that radical honesty creates bridges of non-loneliness.)

Family web: three generations

Priscilla (Nona) becomes a steady Sunday presence; Nana rules holidays; cousin dinners sprawl. Riley and her cousin Navarone become close. The old feud between Lisa and her mother softens, then flips into co-conspiracy; Lisa writes “Raven” as an apology and tribute, and Priscilla beams in tour audiences waiting to hear “her” song. These reconciliations matter: when crisis comes later, this web will either hold—or it won’t.

Why this chapter matters

It shows you how to build a counter-myth. Lisa can’t outrun Elvis, but she can overlay him with rituals of her own design: karaoke in kimonos in Kyoto; Robert Plant at Peppone for Riley’s 17th; scaring kids as Michael Myers on Halloween while also being the mom who chases tarantulas into jars for show-and-tell. Joy isn’t a mood here; it’s a practice, scheduled and spectacular.

Try this at home

Make one family ritual that reframes a painful anniversary (a song, a meal, a place you return to every year). Treat it as art direction for love.

When Riley later calls Hidden Hills “our real childhood home,” you feel why the eventual unraveling hurts so much. The house did what houses are supposed to do: it made a myth of its own—and, for a while, it held.

In a twist that will surprise readers expecting a rock‑and‑roll arc, Lisa’s addiction begins not in her teens but after a C‑section at forty. Norco in the hospital lights up her brain—“oh‑my‑God high”—and opioids become the portal through which old pain rushes in. She moves to England to build a quiet life with her twins, tries Richmond and then a fifteenth‑century estate in Rotherfield, plants radishes and stokes perfect fires, has Christmas at Harrods and roasts at the pub. It’s idyllic until it isn’t. Isolation and pills spiral into a private health crisis that culminates in a desperate bus ride from Nashville to Los Angeles with her twins and Ben to save her heart.

The slow escalation

At first it’s for sleep. Then, to avoid withdrawal. When she tries to quit, she reads that cocaine helps, so she toggles—opioids to stop coke, coke to stop opioids—an addict’s logic she later names plainly. Rehab helps briefly; Suboxone, Seroquel, and gabapentin become a fog that dims her light. Doctors are too stingy or too pliable; celebrity bends systems. She keeps insisting on agency (“I’ll do it my way”)—the same trait that helped her survive abuse now makes recovery perilous.

The body says what the mouth won’t

In Nashville, Riley gets a text thread she’ll never forget: swollen legs, spitting blood, twisted ankles, a heart rate hovering at 30. “I am not well in any way,” Lisa writes. She’s afraid Tennessee laws will take her babies if she admits the truth to an ER. Riley hires a tour bus and sends Ben to drive their mother and the twins cross-country. At Cedars-Sinai, cardiology reads her echo: “literally losing my heart,” Lisa recalls. It’s the biological mirror of the metaphor she’s lived since nine.

Addiction and shame

Perhaps the most piercing insight here is Lisa’s belief that what kept her from getting truly sober sooner was the shame of being an addict with little children—motherhood was the one identity she felt she’d done right. To admit she had failed at that felt like erasing everything. If you’ve lived this, you know the trap: shame is both accelerant and handcuff.

Graceland as last sanctuary

At her nadir, Lisa drives the 200 miles from Nashville to sleep in Elvis’s bed upstairs, tours running below. She lies on his floor; she points out the grave plot in Meditation Garden where she imagines she’ll go. It’s not morbid so much as church—a daughter begging a father to hold her again. Riley sees it for what it is: the house that taught Lisa to love might be the only place that can love her back without asking anything in return.

Perspective

Gabor Maté argues addiction is a response to pain; this chapter reads like a case study. The drug arrives late because the pain is ancient—and the perfect storm of access, isolation, and identity shame keeps the cycle spinning.

The chapter ends with a partial reset—sobriety from narcotics after a terrifying seizure, though mood stabilizers remain. The stage is set for the family’s greatest test.

Riley calls her brother “a force for good,” someone whose joy and tenderness felt preternatural. He could make jewelry, become a sushi chef, fish in Hawaii, start anything and be good fast—so good it made inspiration hard to hold. He looked uncannily like Elvis; Lisa kept that from him so the weight wouldn’t flatten him. When Lisa’s addiction dimmed the house, Ben stayed close—like Elvis and Gladys, mother and son entwined by a love that both saved and scared them.

A night and an hour

July 12, 2020. A party at Lisa’s Calabasas house while she and the twins are at the Beverly Hills Hotel (mold remediation). Ben texts with his mom; she senses something off and urges him to come back. He goes upstairs to “get a beer.” An hour passes. The door is locked. When they break in, he’s gone. Riley gets the 5:30 a.m. call in a different city and races to her mother’s hotel, then to the house now ringed in yellow tape. Police unzip the body bag so Lisa can hold his head and weep, blood on her hands and face. They zip it up and drive away. “The van just drives away, and you just watch it go,” Riley writes. The sentence lands like a hammer.

The grief pod

Covid keeps mourners away; the family builds a pod. Riley is mute for two weeks. Her parents handle arrangements. Lisa keeps Ben’s body at home in a casitas on dry ice for two months—California law allows it—so grief isn’t rushed. A tattoo artist comes to match Ben’s script on Riley’s collarbone and to place “Lisa Marie” on Lisa’s hand in the same spot Ben wore hers. The artist, bewildered but kind, views the body to copy placement. “Top five most absurd moments of my life,” Riley writes, and yet the scene is sacred in its way: a mother, a sister, and a craftsman trying to get love exactly right.

Meaning-making

At the Malibu service—Deepak Chopra officiating, Hawaiian blessing for a boy who loved the islands—letters are launched on biodegradable balloons to Jeff Buckley’s “I Shall Be Released.” He’s buried at Graceland beside his grandfather. Riley slips his coveted yellow Nike “banana shoes” into the casket. In the house, they talk of Ben all day, every day, led by Lisa’s insistence that they “experience this” rather than rush back to business. Riley senses Ben telling her, “There’s a point. Keep going.”

Clear-eyed compassion

Riley never blames him. She believes he wouldn’t have done it sober; substances dulled imagination and amplified despair. Two weeks before, he’d texted Lisa that he thought something was wrong “mentally”—his first acknowledgement he might need help. There had been no cry-for-help attempts. The finality of a gun compounds the shock. The family agrees: the minute he did it, he likely didn’t want to. This clarity, heartbreaking as it is, keeps shame from multiplying grief.

What to carry forward

Hold two truths: your person was not only their worst act, and grief does not lessen—it changes shape. Build rituals that let love keep working: tattoos, songs, fairy gardens, telling the story again.

If you’ve lost someone to suicide, these pages may be hard and holy. They offer a blueprint for reverent chaos—permission to keep a body near, to speak in the family’s own language, and to insist on tenderness even when the van drives away.

After Ben’s death, Lisa surprises everyone by not relapsing. She directs her pain into service—hosting grief circles for bereaved parents at home, writing an op‑ed that names grief’s permanence, planning a podcast. She becomes a grandmother—Tupelo Danielle—who she calls a “little fawn.” She sneaks into a hospital’s restricted area to find the newborn (of course she does). She babysits overnight so Riley and her husband can sleep, just as Riley once did for her twins. She wants one last magical Christmas—Whistler, snow—but a passport snafu blocks it. Something in her seems to exhale in resignation.

A body keeps the score

Through late 2022, Lisa cycles through fevers, infections, and nausea she waves away with Pepto-Bismol at her bedside. She has a hysterectomy and grieves the organ that “held all my babies.” At Disneyland in October, she sits on the steps before a ride, too sick to continue. Riley begs her to see a doctor; Lisa deflects. The pattern is familiar to many caretakers: she can show up for everyone else, but treatment for herself feels like an indulgence.

The last days

New Year’s Eve in Santa Ynez: a honky-tonk cover band does “Suspicious Minds”; Lisa laughs when the lead singer barely acknowledges her compliment. Later that night, Riley, Lisa, and Danny share a cigarette under a light rain—the three of them, pirates again, stealing a moment before the storm. On January 8, Elvis’s birthday, Lisa is quiet at dinner and leaves early. On January 12, she texts Danny for Tums; the housekeeper finds her on the floor. Paramedics resuscitate her; then she goes again. Riley, on a plane above Yosemite, tells her mother in silent prayer, “If you need to go, go. If you need to stay, stay.” By the time she lands in Los Angeles, Lisa is gone. Danny, who has protected Lisa since she was seventeen, is with her at the end.

Meditation Garden

At Graceland, the night before the funeral, friends say goodbye in the chapel. The next day, a choir of her people sings, and grief slowly morphs into a dance party like the old Hidden Hills nights—same songs, same bodies moving in a chain of love. Her casket rides on a golf cart—the vehicle of her first freedom—across the grass to Meditation Garden. She is buried beside Ben and across from Elvis. A daughter completes the geometry of a life built between upstairs rooms and open lawns.

Riley’s parting insight

“You must allow pain in to free yourself from it.” Grief doesn’t weaken over time; your capacity grows around it. Find joy where you can—swing sets, lullabies, cigars in the rain—and let it live beside the lion’s roar.

If you came to this book for celebrity secrets, you stay for something gentler and braver: a family learning to be human in front of you. That’s the great unknown the title names—not the afterlife, but the uncharted everyday after a loss, where you keep making rituals and keep telling the truth until meaning returns.