There’s a bluebird in my heart that wants to get out but I’m too tough for him, I say, stay in there, I’m not going to let anybody see you.
In the lines that follow, the narrator says he hides the bluebird inside himself, pushing him down and camouflaging him with vices such as smoking and drinking. However, he occasionally lets the bird emerge at night when nobody else can see or hear it.As a symbol of love, innocence, and divinity, the image of the bluebird shines in this beautiful poem. Riley Keough, Lisa Marie’s eldest daughter, who wrote the memoir after her mother’s death, chose to include the poem in lieu of a dedication.
It’s a fitting tribute to Lisa Marie, a woman with a loving heart, sincere disposition, and deeply spiritual inclinations, but who was overcome by rebellious tendencies that often led her astray.
Life in the Spotlight
The only daughter of Elvis Presley—the “King of Rock and Roll” and one of the most iconic singers of the 20th century—Lisa Marie Presley was born into a spotlight that followed her throughout her life. While this spotlight was especially apparent during her childhood when Elvis was still alive, the public interest never seemed to truly leave her. The attention intensified even more in the 1990s during her brief yet controversial marriage to Michael Jackson, the “King of Pop.”It seemed that tabloids couldn’t get enough of Lisa Marie. After all, she had intimately known two of the most popular singers in the world, each with millions of adoring—even obsessive—fans.
Yet celebrity status wasn’t something she relished. On the contrary, her father’s fame haunted her. Decades after his death, Lisa Marie, who launched her own music career in the early 2000s, dreaded stepping out on a concert stage for fear of finding Elvis impersonators in the audience.
As Riley recalled in the memoir, “How weird to have someone wearing a costume of your dead father watch you sing. She really wanted to be taken seriously, but it was kind of never going to happen.”
A Devastating Loss
When Elvis Presley died in 1977, Lisa Marie was only 9 years old and deeply attached to her father—a self-described “daddy’s girl.” After Elvis’s body was brought back to Graceland for public viewing, countless people came up to his casket to say goodbye. The young Lisa Marie sat by the stairs with two friends, watching rows upon rows of people coming pay their honors to Elvis. Some of the fans were crying, screaming, or even fainting.As she recalls in the memoir, it was a time filled with contradictory feelings. “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.’”
For many years after his death, Lisa Marie had vivid dreams of her father coming to talk to her. They would be sitting in her room at Graceland, enjoying a conversation, when she would suddenly panic and try to warn him that he would have a heart attack. But as she recalls in the memoir, “in the dream, my dad looks at me so calmly, so knowingly, smiles, and says, ‘Darlin,’ it’s already happened.'”
According to Lisa Marie, these weren’t dreams at all, but actual visitations. They only stopped in 1992 after her son, Benjamin, was born. This was one example of a connection to the spiritual realm that she had throughout her life, and while people rarely believed her, she tried to instill that sense of spiritual connection in her children as well.
Mother-Daughter Collaboration
One month before her untimely death in January 2023, Lisa Marie asked Riley to help her finish the memoir she'd been working on for several years. Lisa Marie had recorded hours of tapes sharing her memories, but couldn’t figure out how to write the book.In the book’s preface, Riley addresses one of the challenges her mother faced. “She didn’t find herself interesting, even though, of course, she was. She didn’t like talking about herself. She was insecure. She wasn’t sure what her value to the public was other than being Elvis’s daughter. She was so wrecked with self-criticism that working on the book became incredibly difficult for her.”
After Lisa Marie’s death, Riley, by now was a successful actress, wife, and mother herself, set out to write the memoir. It proved to be a bittersweet, often difficult process, especially as she started to listen to the tapes. “It was incredibly painful, but I couldn’t stop. It was like she was in the room, talking to me.”
‘Where No One Stands Alone’
“From Here to the Great Unknown” is a fascinating and deeply personal book. It takes readers from Lisa Marie’s childhood to her rebellious teen years, which were followed by a string of stormy marriages, a heavy addiction to opioids later in life, and finally, her untimely death to complications due to an earlier stomach surgery.It’s a gripping story, yet one that is strongly punctuated by grief, not only for the early loss of her father, but also due to the death of her son in 2020. It was loss that Lisa Marie tried to overcome, mainly for her three daughters, but it was a loss that broke her heart. Yet amid this grief, a thread of spirituality and search for meaning that runs throughout the book. Lisa Marie, like most of us, searched for meaning and a higher purpose in life.
Written by gospel music songwriter Mosie Lister in 1955, the song was originally recorded by Elvis as part of the 1967 album “How Great Thou Art.” Its lyrics tell of a wealthy but lonely man who cries out to God in the darkness to hold his hand “from here to the great unknown.”
That said, Lisa Marie Presley’s memoir is a touching book and a profoundly human story—one that leaves readers with many reflections about life, family, grief, and spirituality that last long after the last page is turned.
