Lisa Marie Presley Shares Emotional Details from Day Dad Elvis Died in New Memoir: 'I Was Screaming Bloody Murder'
Presley's posthumous memoir, 'From Here to the Great Unknown,' was released on Tuesday, Oct. 8
Lisa Marie Presley's posthumous memoir shares new insight into the day her father, Elvis Presley, died at Graceland.
In From Here to the Great Unknown, Lisa Marie looks back on Aug. 16, 1977, the day she lost her legendary dad.
"I ran to him, but somebody grabbed me, pulled me back. They were trying to work on him," she writes in the book. "I was screaming bloody murder. I knew it was not good.”
Later, Lisa Marie, who was just 9 years old at the time, could hear her paternal grandfather "wailing, wailing," she writes. "That noise. I’ll never get past that sound of him wailing. I could hear, 'Oh he’s gone. He’s gone.’ ”
That was the day the music stopped — and "my life as I knew it is completely over," Lisa Marie writes of her father's death by complications of drug use at 42.
More than 45 years later, in January 2023, Lisa Marie died of a small bowel obstruction, a long-term complication from bariatric surgery she underwent several years ago; she was 54.
A month before her death, Lisa Marie's daughter, actress Riley Keough, told her mom she'd help her complete her memoir. Now, she's made good on that promise, finishing the book after listening to tapes of memories her mother left behind.
"Because my mother was Elvis Presley’s daughter, she was constantly talked about, argued over and dissected,” Riley, 35, told PEOPLE in an exclusive email interview for last week's cover story. “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. To turn her 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. I want to give voice to my mother in a way that eluded her while she was alive.”
Elsewhere in the book, Lisa Marie writes of being concerned about her father's mortality.
"I was always worried about my dad dying," Lisa Marie writes. "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 a new interview with Oprah Winfrey airing Tuesday, Oct. 8 on CBS, Riley opens up about her mother's struggle to reconcile with Elvis' death.
"Her grief was very.... I don't think she knew how to process it," Riley said. "It was a very private thing for her. She would listen to his music alone, if she was drunk, and cry ... I would walk in her room and she had speakers — because this was back in the day — and she would be sitting on the floor crying and she'd listen to her dad's music."
From Here to the Great Unknown is out now.
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