From Here to the Great Unknown

“I felt my father could change the weather. He was a god to me. A chosen human being. He had that thing where you could see his soul. If he was in a shitty mood, it was shitty outside; if it was storming, it was because he was about to go off. I believed back then that he could make it storm.”

In these opening sentences, Lisa describes the power and presence that her father possessed. Although many little girls worship their fathers, Elvis was a dynamic force of nature both on the global stage and in their home, and Lisa could sense the strength of his personality even as a child. She portrays him as the kind of man who was in control and bent circumstances and individuals to his will.

“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