In the years leading up to her sudden death at age 54 on January 12, 2023, Lisa Marie Presley had been struggling with completing her memoir, recording herself on tape in an attempt to share the intense ups and downs of her life in the spotlight.
“She didn’t find herself interesting, even though, of course, she was,” her daughter, actress Riley Keough, writes in the introduction of the posthumously published From Here to the Great Unknown: A Memoir.
“She wasn’t sure what her value to the public was other than being Elvis’ daughter.”
Lisa Marie was born nine months after her mother, Priscilla, married the King of Rock ’n’ Roll.
She was 9 years old when her father died at age 42 in 1977. She followed her father’s path into music, releasing three albums, but her tumultuous personal life made more headlines, including her battles with addiction and marriages to Michael Jackson and Nicholas Cage.
Motherhood was a mooring for her. She welcomed Riley and son Benjamin with her first husband, musician Danny Keough, to whom she was married from 1988 to 1994.
In 2006, she married musician Michael Lockwood, and together they had twin daughters Harper Vivienne and Finley Aaron, born in 2008, before going through
a brutal divorce. But her heart was forever broken in July 2020, when Benjamin died by suicide aged just 27.
“My heart and soul went with you,” Lisa Marie wrote on his first birthday following his death. “The depth of the pain is suffocating and bottomless without you
… I will never be the same.”
In an email interview with People Magazine, Riley confirmed that sad truth. “My mum tried her best to find strength for me and my younger sisters after Ben died, but we knew how much pain she was in,” said Riley, who took over writing her mother’s memoir after Lisa Marie died from a small bowel obstruction.
“My mum physically died from the after effects of her surgery, but we all knew she died of a broken heart.”
Lisa Marie shared more about her relationship with loss while preparing her memoir, which both Riley and actress Julia Roberts narrate in the audio version.
“I was always worried about my dad dying,” Lisa Marie said, according to an excerpt published in People. “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.’”
In the wake of Lisa Marie’s death, there was some murkiness surrounding her wishes after her mother Priscilla filed a petition in court questioning the validity of an amendment making Riley the sole trustee of her estate.
Eventually, a settlement agreement was officially approved by a Los Angeles Superior Court judge, confirming, among other things, that Priscilla will receive a $1.45 million lump-sum payment funded by Lisa Marie’s $36 million life insurance policy, paid $145,000 a year for her role as a special advisor, and that Riley will permit Priscilla to be buried near her ex-husband, Elvis Presley, at Graceland upon her death.
“My hope is to continue what my grandmother did, and then my mother did,” Riley told People. “Which is simply to preserve our family home.”
Riley, who in 2015 married Australian stuntman Ben Smith-Petersen, with whom she shares daughter Tupelo (named after the Mississippi city in which Elvis was born), is hoping the memoir will shore up her mother’s legacy.
“What I hope I’ve done in finishing it for her, is to go beneath the magazine headline idea of her and reveal the core of who she was,” she told People.
“To turn her into a three-dimensional human being: the best mother, a wild child, a fierce friend, an underrated artist, frank, funny, traumatised, joyous, grieving – everything that she was throughout her remarkable life. I want to give voice to my mother in a way that eluded her while she was alive.”
From Here to the Great Unknown is now available to purchase through the following retailers: