Lisa Marie Presley had been working on a memoir for several years by December 2022 when she asked daughter Riley Keough to help finish the project. One month later, Lisa Marie died of cardiac arrest at age 54. And Riley, 35, was left mourning not only her mom, but also the fact that she would no longer be able to help Lisa Marie tell her story.
Then the Daisy Jones & the Six star sat on her bed and listened to the hours of stories Lisa Marie had recorded for her book and realized she could fulfill her mother’s wishes after all. Using the audio logs, Riley completed From Here to the Great Unknown, which hits stores October 8. “I’m so excited to share my mom now, at her most vulnerable and most honest,” Riley has said. “In doing so, I do hope that readers come to love my mom as much as I did.”
Though she’s proud of the book, the process was far from easy for Riley. “Working on it was very emotional but also very healing,” an insider exclusively tells Life & Style. “Riley felt obligated to see the memoir through, knowing it was important to her mother.”
Readers will no doubt eat up the diaries of Elvis Presley’s misunderstood only child. There are joyful tales of Lisa Marie riding (and crashing!) golf carts at Graceland with the King, as well as details of the harrowing night in 1977 when 42-year-old Elvis passed away and Lisa Marie, only 9 years old, ran toward his body on the bathroom floor.
What’s more, the book delves into Lisa Marie’s troubled life with mother Priscilla Presley, 79, after her father’s death. It pulls back the curtain on her famous romances – she was wed to Michael Jackson, Nicolas Cage, Michael Lockwood and Riley’s father, Danny Keough – plus explores Lisa Marie’s addiction battle.
The 2020 suicide of Lisa Marie and Danny’s son, Riley’s brother Benjamin, is included, too. “In the years after Benjamin’s death, Riley and Lisa Marie leaned on each other as they dealt with the crippling grief,” notes an insider. “In many ways, Riley cared for Lisa Marie – their relationship was not typical for a mother and child. But no one knew Lisa Marie better than Riley.”
As Riley’s own daughter, Tupelo, 2, grows, says the insider, she has an even greater respect for all her mom went through. The last time she saw Lisa Marie? It was just two days prior to her untimely death — a meetup that will forever be burned in Riley’s memory. “We had dinner,” the actress previously recalled to Vanity Fair. “I remember thinking about how beautiful she looked.”
