Yahoo Lifestyle Lisa Marie Presley Reveals in Posthumous Memoir She Was 'Always Worried' About Dad Elvis 'Dying' (Exclusive)
In her posthumous memoir, the star says she "wrote a poem with the line, 'I hope my daddy doesn't die'" as a kid
Lisa Marie Presley was only 9 when her dad Elvis Presley died from complications of drug use in 1977, but she had long-simmering fears about losing him.
"I was always worried about my dad dying," Lisa Marie says in her posthumous memoir From Here to the Great Unknown, excerpted exclusively in this week's PEOPLE cover story. "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.'"
Elsewhere in the memoir, which the star's daughter Riley Keough completed by listening to tapes of memories her mother left behind after her death at age 54 in 2023, Lisa Marie describes what it was like watching her dad onstage as a kid.
"Going to his shows was my favorite thing in the world," she says. "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' father] Vernon."
"The electricity of those shows. There’s nothing I’ve felt that’s been even close to that feeling, ever," she continues. "Electrifying is such a generic word, but it really is what it felt like. I loved watching him perform. I had certain songs that I liked — 'Hurt,' and 'How Great Thou Art.' I would ask him to sing those songs for me and he would always say yes."
Years after Elvis' death, Lisa Marie abused drugs as a rebellious teenager. She later found stability for many years after she married her first husband Danny Keough and gave birth to Riley at 21.
"I fell in love with being a mom. I realized I had been called to care for something else,” Lisa Marie writes in the book.
For more on Riley Keough finishing her mom Lisa Marie Presley's powerful memoir, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribe here.
She divorced Danny in 1994, though the memoir details how he stayed an anchor for her and their children. (Along with Riley, Lisa Marie and Danny also had son Benjamin, who died by suicide at age 27 in 2020.)
"My father was always my mom’s greatest protector and best friend,” Riley tells PEOPLE in an email interview. "I think their relationship was incredibly unique, and I’m so grateful to have been a witness to the unconditional love they had for one another."
Ron Galella/Ron Galella Collection/Getty
Lisa Marie Presley and Danny Keough at the Club Lingerie in Hollywood, California.After the 2008 birth of her twins Finley and Harper (with Michael Lockwood, her husband from 2006 to 2021), Lisa Marie became addicted to prescription painkillers.
“For a couple of years it was recreational and then it wasn’t,” Lisa Marie says in the book. “It was an absolute matter of addiction, withdrawal in the big leagues.”
At times, Riley says in the book, “it sounds like she wants to burn the world to the ground; other times, she displays compassion and empathy — all facets of the woman who was my mother, each of those strands, beautiful and broken, forged together in early trauma, crashing together at the end of her life."
Through From Here to the Great Unknown, Riley hopes her mom turns into a "three-dimensional human being: the best mother, a wild child, a fierce friend, an underrated artist, frank, funny, traumatized, joyous, grieving, everything that she was throughout her remarkable life."
"Because my mother was Elvis Presley’s daughter, she was constantly talked about, argued over and dissected,” Riley says. “What she wanted to do in her memoir, and 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...I want to give voice to my mother in a way that eluded her while she was alive.”
From Here to the Great Unknown by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough comes out Oct. 8 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.
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