Photo: Martin Philbey/Redferns
The late Lisa Marie Presley will release a posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, co-written by her eldest daughter, Riley Keough. Before Presley’s sudden death in January 2023, she’d been working on a book for a while but struggled to write about her memories until she enlisted Keough to help her just one month before she died. To help, Presley recorded hours of memoir tapes that Keough listened to months later in order to finish the book. “The early parts of the book are mostly” in her mother’s voice, and Keough “wanted this book to be as intimate as all those hours” of audio she listened to. Here’s everything we know about Presley’s memoir, out on October 8.
On her father, Elvis Presley
She still remembered going to Elvis’s concerts.
“Going to his shows was my favorite thing in the world,” Lisa Marie explained in an excerpt in People. “I was so proud of him. He would take me by the hand and bring me out onstage, then get walked to wherever his place was on the stage, and I would be taken from him and brought to wherever I was going to be sitting in the audience. Usually with [Elvis’s father] Vernon.” She remembered the “electricity” of his performances.
As a child, Lisa Marie “always worried” about her father dying.
Elvis Presley died when Lisa Marie was 9, but throughout her childhood, she had fears of losing her father, writing in an excerpt shared with People, “I was always worried about my dad dying. 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.’”
Elvis went to her parent-teacher conferences at school.
“I could feel the teachers’ nervousness and excitement, too. My little student friends were so excited that I got even more excited — everybody was just running around crazy. Then my dad showed up. He got out of the car and he had on a respectable outfit — black pants and some kind of blouse — but he was also wearing a big, majestic belt with buckles and jewels and chains, as well as sunglasses. He was smoking a cigar. I met him at the car, and I walked up the walkway with him, and I just remember that feeling of walking next to him, holding his hand.”
On her daughter Riley Keough
Riley Keough agreed to help her finish the memoir a month before she died.
”Though she tried various approaches, and sat for many book interviews, she couldn’t figure out how to write about herself,” Keough shared in the introduction of the book that she wrote with People. “The last 10 years of her life had been so brutally hard that she was only able to look back on everything through that lens. She felt I could have a more holistic view of her life than she could. So I agreed to help her with it, not thinking much of the commitment, assuming we would write it together over time. A month later, she died.”
She had deep compassion for her children.
“I fell in love with being a mom. I realized I had been called to care for something else,” Lisa Marie wrote about her four children: Riley, Benjamin, Finley, and Harper Vivienne.
On her substance-use struggles
Lisa Marie reflects on her addiction to opioids.
“For a couple of years, it was recreational, and then it wasn’t,” Lise Marie said of her addiction after her pregnancy in 2008, shared with People. “It was an absolute matter of addiction, withdrawal in the big leagues.” She was given a “short-term prescription of opioids” after the birth of her twin daughters, Finley and Harper Vivienne, and she felt “the need to keep taking them” after her recovery.
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