Comedians Claire Parker and Ashley Hamilton are no strangers to celebrity memoirs — or what it’s like to learn more about the stars in them.
The co-hosts discuss a new celebrity book every week on their podcast, Celebrity Memoir Book Club, and tackled From Here to the Great Unknown, written by the late Lisa Marie Presley and her daughter Riley Keough, during the Nov. 12 episode.
From Here to the Great Unknown details Lisa Marie’s childhood at Graceland as the daughter of Elvis and Priscilla Presley, as well as her marriages to Michael Jackson and Keough’s father, Danny.
Parker and Hamilton rehashed some of the most fascinating aspects of the memoir, like Lisa Marie’s relationship with her father. They also discussed what reading it was like for someone who didn’t know the Presley family personally. In one section, Lisa Marie describes being on a rollercoaster with Elvis while he was carrying a gun, just a week before his death in 1977.
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“Unless you knew or understood him, that sounds terrible, I know,” Lisa Marie wrote. “You might think he was crazy, carrying a piece with his daughter sitting next to him, but he was just from the South. It was just really funny.”
For readers who didn’t know the King of Pop, though, anecdotes like that one hit a little differently.
“I think that that was what was so stressful about this book, is reading this with no processing,” Hamilton said. “I get when you’re a kid being like, ‘How funny is it that my dad just has a gun on him while we’re on a rollercoaster?’”
The singer died due to cardiac arrhythmia, and had numerous health problems later in life, including mild diabetes and hypertension. In the memoir, Lisa Marie recalled another incident in which she had friends over at Graceland and went to check on her father. She found Elvis facedown in the bathroom after a fall, and her friends had to help him up.
“She and her friends would be hanging out in her room, and then her dad would come to the door and they’d see him about to topple over,” Hamilton said.
Random House
Parker added that she felt Lisa Marie “took a lot of pride” in the fact that she was “super aware” of what her father was experiencing.
“She’s constantly on the lookout for her dad,” Hamilton added. “She takes a lot of pride in being the person who, like, has a connection with him, where she can tell when he’s in distress and get to him as quickly as possible.”
“I was always worried about my dad dying,” Lisa Marie wrote in the book. “Sometimes I’d see him and he was out of it. Sometimes I would find him passed out. I wrote a poem with the line, ‘I hope my daddy doesn’t die.'”
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From Here to the Great Unknown, published on Oct. 8 by Random House, was completed by Keough after Lisa Marie died at age 54 in Jan. 2023 from a small bowel obstruction. Before her death, Lisa Marie created a number of tape recordings, which Keough listened to in order to finish the book.
“I hope that in an extraordinary circumstance, people relate to a very human experience of love, heartbreak, loss, addiction and family,” Keough told PEOPLE in an email interview for an Oct. 7 print cover story. “[My mom] wanted to write a book in the hopes that someone could read her story and relate to her, to know that they’re not alone in the world. Her hope with this book was just human connection. So that’s mine.”
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From Here to the Great Unknown is now available, wherever books are sold. New episodes of Celebrity Memoir Book Club are available weekly.
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