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Lisa Marie Presley wrote in her posthumous memoir that she struggled after Elvis Presley died when she was 9 years old.
"My life as I knew it was completely over," Lisa Marie wrote in her recently released memoir titled "From Here to the Great Unknown." The book was completed by her daughter, Riley Keough, after Lisa Marie's death in 2023.
In her book, Lisa Marie shared candid and fond memories of her legendary father. After Elvis and Priscilla Presley split up when Lisa Marie was 4, she remained close to her dad.
"I knew how much I was adored, how much he loved me," Lisa Marie said. "I knew that he knew that I hated, hated, hated leaving him."
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Lisa Marie said that she "was always worried" about Elvis dying.
"It's your greatest childhood fear: When you love someone, you don't want to lose them," she said. "It's fucking terror, and it tortures you. Most kids have that worry."
Elvis died at 42 years old in Graceland in 1977.
After being found on the floor of his bathroom, he was rushed to the hospital. Lisa Marie said that she was "infuriated" when he was pronounced dead.
"I just didn't know what to do," she said. "Anger, extreme anger, was my first response; the grief came later. I don't really know why, except that I was angry at the universe that this could happen."
Keough said that she didn't think her mother ever processed Elvis' death until the final year that she was alive.
"But I certainly knew that she was heartbroken my whole life," Keough wrote.
Lisa Marie said in her memoir that twice a year after Elvis' death, she had vivid dreams, which she referred to as visitations, of her father. She said the dreams stopped when her son Benjamin Keough was born in 1992. But later in her life, Lisa Marie would look for solace in her father's memory in a different way.
In the book, Lisa Marie recalled becoming addicted to opioids at 40 years old, after the birth of her twin daughters Finley and Harper. At one point, she said, her addiction "escalated to 80 pills a day."
"For a couple of years, it was recreational, and then it wasn't," Lisa Marie wrote. "It was an absolute matter of addiction, withdrawal in the big leagues."
"I just wanted to check out," she said. "It was too painful to be sober."
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According to Keough, Lisa Marie regularly traveled to her childhood home for comfort.
"When she lived in Nashville, in the depths of her addiction, my mom would often drive the two hundred miles southwest to Graceland to sleep in her dad's bed," Keough wrote in the memoir. "It seemed like the only place she found any comfort."
Keough said that she and her siblings were often brought along for the ride, and they'd all sleep in Elvis' room.
"I wish this was a magical time in a magical family place," Keough said. "But the truth of it was, she was in the house desperate to feel protected, desperate to connect with her father. She should lie in his bed, lie on his floor, anything to feel some comfort."
Lisa Marie's health continued deteriorating, and she died in January 2023 at 54 years old. The cause of death was a small bowel obstruction from a previous surgery. She was buried in Graceland, next to her son Benjamin, who died by suicide in 2020, and across from Elvis.
Since its release on Tuesday, "From Here to the Great Unknown" has already become a bestseller on Amazon and is Oprah Winfrey's latest selection for her book club. The memoir, which had been in the works for years before Lisa Marie's death, was reportedly sold for between $3 million and $4 million.
