43 pages • 1-hour read
Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis
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Chapters 13-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of substance use, addiction, illness, mental illness, death, and death by suicide.
Chapter 13 Summary: “Second Thoughts”
Lisa Marie and Michael had twins, Harper and Finley, in 2008. Priscilla let herself believe her daughter was doing well during this period, but would later discover that Lisa Marie was using drugs again: She’d started taking pain medication after the birth and soon became addicted. Lisa Marie had sworn Michael to secrecy, but Priscilla eventually learned the truth.
Navarone faced struggles of his own. He had moved to Santa Cruz to preserve his anonymity. Soon, Priscilla discovered he was growing pot and hoped the media wouldn’t expose him.
Lisa Marie returned to her musical career. However, when she wasn’t nominated for a Grammy for her 2012 album Storm & Grace, she gave up music for good. Around this time, Lisa Marie was breaking away from Scientology, too. Priscilla ended up leaving the church to support Lisa Marie.
Chapter 14 Summary: “Raise Your Voice”
Priscilla was drawn to several vocational pursuits. After Navarone moved out, she began working with Last Chance for Animals. She has always loved animals and been devoted to using her voice to advocate for them. She also continued preserving Elvis’s legacy. The US Postal Service issued another Elvis stamp in 2015, and hosted another dedication concert; Priscilla not only attended, but also spoke at the event. Priscilla hosted other events in Elvis’s memory and released tribute albums with the Philharmonic. Then in 2014, she began working on an Elvis documentary, eager to present a more authentic version of her late husband to the world. The Searcher premiered in 2018 and was a success. She hopes Elvis would have been proud.
Chapter 15 Summary: “Poison Apples”
Priscilla has a lifelong love for England. Lisa Marie and her family moved there, giving Priscilla more reasons to visit the beloved country. Then one year, Priscilla got the opportunity to play “the evil queen in Snow White opposite Warwick Davis” (220). It was a positive experience. However, a far worse “evil” was spreading in her own family.
Lisa Marie still had addiction issues, as did Navarone. Priscilla was shocked when she discovered that Navarone was using heroin. He did his best to hide it from her, but was forced to move back in with her after the media ran a story about him growing marijuana. During this time, Navarone became addicted to fentanyl. Priscilla tried to get him help but to no avail. Lisa Marie’s drug use was also becoming overwhelming. Priscilla describes encountering an intoxicated Lisa Marie. Finally, Lisa Marie went back to rehab.
However, Lisa Marie became resentful of Michael for attempting to help her and filed for divorce. She then petitioned the court for full custody of the twins, alleging that Michael was neglectful. Michael countersued, citing Lisa’s addiction as inhibitive to caring for the girls. A protracted custody battle ensued. Priscilla assumed temporary custody of the twins. Finley, Harper, as well as Benjamin, moved in with Priscilla while the divorce and custody proceedings continued. This lasted a year. Lisa Marie petitioned the court to reassume custody and it was granted, which surprised Priscilla. In her continuing legal fight against Michael, Lisa Marie and asked Priscilla to support her claims “that Michael was unfit to have custody of the girls” (234). Priscilla refused, because she knew Michael was a good father. Lisa Marie never forgave her. In retrospect, Priscilla realizes this is when she lost Lisa Marie.
Chapter 16 Summary: “Storm and Grace”
As the years passed, Priscilla saw her granddaughter, Riley, grow up and get married. Her father, Paul, died. Priscilla considers the challenges of their relationship; Paul had discouraged her early relationship with Elvis, but Priscilla was desperate to be with him no matter what her parents said.
Elvis’s death impacted Lisa Marie deeply over the years, both directly and indirectly. Giving birth to Ben changed something in Lisa Marie. Ben looked uncannily like Elvis, which made their bond difficult despite Lisa Marie’s deep love for her son. Then in 2020, Ben died by suicide at a house party in Beverly Hills. No one could believe it. It was a shockingly difficult period; each family member dealt with their grief differently. However, it was hardest for Lisa Marie. Priscilla claims that her daughter never got over Ben’s death.
Chapters 13-16 Analysis
Priscilla focuses on her family’s history of addiction and encounters with loss to further her thematic exploration of the Generational Nature of Trauma. These chapters feature cycles of substance abuse, marital tension, and interpersonal strife. These chapters convey how dysfunctional patterns of loss and grief, hurt and distress can repeat if not disrupted.
Priscilla describes her family’s struggles as a poison—a metaphor which underscores how inescapable their pain felt. In Chapter 15, she compares the poison apple in Snow White to the devastation her family experienced: “Wickedness on a pantomime stage wielding a poison apple is one thing. In real life, it’s entirely another. The malignancy that seeped into my family during those same years slowly began to poison our lives” (222). Diction including “malignancy,” “seeped,” “slowly,” and “poison” convey the insidious impact of Lisa Marie and Navarone’s drug addictions. The metaphor has two layers of meaning: The intoxicants are literal poison that Priscilla’s daughter and son ingested, and come with the more figurative toxin of addiction that slowly destroyed relationships and ate away at mental health. Moreover, Lisa Marie and Navarone’s reliance on pain medications and intravenous drugs echoed Elvis’s own substance abuse. Priscilla sees Lisa Marie as burdened by a genetic predisposition for addiction, by the trauma of losing “her father at such a young age” (222), and by the pressure of growing up in the spotlight performing an identity that satisfied public expectations. Unable to handle the emotional weight, Lisa Marie became increasingly withdrawn from her family. Something similar happened to Navarone, who pulled away from his mother in an attempt to hide his addiction. The longer the effects of these “poisons” went unaddressed, the more trouble brewed in Priscilla’s family circle.
Priscilla balances expressions of sorrow and loss with an outpouring of remembrance and honor, to present a more nuanced account of her life. Even in these “most difficult years of my life” (231), she maintained her dedication to preserving Elvis’s name and memory, never ceasing Navigating Fame, Public Expectation, and Legacy. Amid the tribulations, Priscilla continued her lifelong devotion to ensuring that Elvis was memorialized in a way that would do him justice. Her work with the Graceland estate, the Philharmonic, the US Postal Service, and on The Searcher documentary demonstrates her effort to keep Elvis’s achievements alive so generations might continue to appreciate the singer, idol, thinker, and man he was.
However, rather than simply letting Elvis evolve into the caricatured icon of excess that he had become in media portrayals, Priscilla followed her own instincts in making sure depictions of him portrayed the man she knew—a feat of self-assuredness that emphasizes her journey of Discovering Personal Autonomy and Self-Empowerment. In the memoir, Priscilla challenges readers’ assumptions, dismissing flattened fictionalizations of her late ex-husband using a declarative tone: “People didn’t know Elvis deeply. He wasn’t just a singer. He wasn’t just an entertainer” (214). Eager for Elvis to be remembered more accurately and with more dimension, Priscilla contextualized him in a variety of media. Her documentary, The Searcher, symbolizes to Priscilla her determination to acting with integrity when describing Elvis, despite what critics might say in response.
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