The late Lisa Marie Presley has released 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 to know about Presley’s memoir, including new details about how she grieved both Elvis and her son Benjamin, plus claims that Michael Jackson was a virgin when they married.
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.”
She sat alone with Elvis’s body to grieve.
After hundreds of thousands of people showed up for her father’s public viewing, a then 9-year-old Lisa Marie took time to privately mourn him. “I was so busy looking at everyone else’s grief that I couldn’t actually have mine yet,” she recalls in an excerpt shared during Oprah’s CBS special on the Presleys. “I went down to where he was lying in the casket, just to be with him, to touch his face and hold his hand, to talk to him. I asked him, ‘Why is this happening? And why are you doing this?’”
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 son Benjamin Keough
He reminded her of Elvis.
“Ben was very similar to his grandfather, very, very, very, and in every way. He even looked like him. Ben was so much like him, it scared me,” she wrote in an excerpt shared during Oprah’s special on the Presleys. “I didn’t want to tell him because I thought it was too much to put on a kid. We were very close. He’d tell me everything. Ben and I had the same relationship that my father and his mother had. It was a generational f—ing cycle. Gladys loved my dad so much that she drank herself to death worrying about him. Ben didn’t stand a f—ing chance.”
She kept his body at Graceland on dry ice for two months.
“There is no law in the state of California that you have to bury someone immediately,” Lisa Marie wrote in an excerpt obtained by People, noting that it took time to decide where to bury him. “I got so used to him, caring for him and keeping him there. I think it would scare the living f—ing piss out of anybody else to have their son there like that. But not me.”
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.
On Michael Jackson
Lisa Marie claims her ex-husband Michael Jackson was a virgin.
“He told me he was still a virgin,” Presley wrote in book, per People. “I think he had kissed Tatum O’Neal, and he’d had a thing with Brooke Shields, which hadn’t been physical apart from a kiss. He said Madonna had tried to hook up with him once, too, but nothing happened. I was terrified because I didn’t want to make the wrong move.”
She remembers how they got together.
“Michael said, ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m completely in love with you. I want us to get married and for you to have my children,’” Presley wrote. “I didn’t say anything immediately, but then I said, ‘I’m really flattered, I can’t even talk.’ By then, I felt I was in love with him too.”
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