Yahoo Lifestyle Riley Keough Is Still 'Trying to Make Sense of' Mom Lisa Marie Presley and Brother Benjamin's Deaths (Exclusive)
"It went from joy for 25 years of my life to this nightmare in about a year and a half," the actress tells PEOPLE
Cory Osborne
Riley Keough recording the From Here to the Great Unknown audiobookRiley Keough is opening up about the back-to-back tragedies of losing her brother Benjamin Keough and mother Lisa Marie Presley.
"It went from joy for 25 years of my life to this nightmare in about a year and a half," the Daisy Jones & the Six actress tells PEOPLE.
Benjamin died by suicide at age 27 in 2020, and Lisa Marie died three years later at age 54 of a small bowel obstruction, a long-term complication from bariatric surgery. In her mom's posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, Riley, 35, writes about just how connected her mother and brother's deaths were.
"I had an instinct Ben was the love of my mom’s life," Riley writes. "Just as Elvis had with his mother, and my mom had with Elvis, my brother and my mom had a kind of 'I can't live without you' relationship. They shared a very deep soul bond."
A decade into Lisa Marie's addiction to opioids (which she started taking following the birth of her twins Finley and Harper Lockwood in 2008), Benjamin's own addiction struggles began growing in private, as did his depression.
"My brother was just an incredibly sensitive person, and there was addiction there with him," Riley tells PEOPLE. "But it's something I am constantly replaying in my mind going, 'What happened?' Because it felt like everything was fine and extremely normal for many years. So it was very destabilizing and shocking. I think my brother's addiction was his way of coping with his own discomfort and emotional pain. And it was a few years that got just really incredibly difficult."
Following Benjamin's death, Riley writes in From Here to the Great Unknown she "knew" her mom wouldn't survive long.
"I knew any time I got with her after would be a gift," she writes. "I couldn’t imagine her living without my brother."
The link in their deaths, Riley says, is "something I think about all the time, and I'm trying to make sense of it all the time."
"Like I said before, what has been the hardest about all of this is that we had such great and beautiful times, and most of our life was that," she says. "So it was really hard for us to understand the decline in the family."
While watching her mother and brother's addiction struggles unfold, Riley says she "felt like there was an uphill battle a lot."
"I think this is common when you love someone who is an addict, where you feel helpless a lot and out of control," she says. "It was a feeling of trying to exist in a relationship with your loved ones where you're just constantly out of control and worried. You live in a place of uncertainty and feeling like you might experience loss all the time."
Despite the hard times in recent years, Riley hopes From Here to the Great Unknown shows that her family isn't only defined by tragedy.
"A lot of our life was very happy," she says. "The tragedy within my family has been so heartbreaking, but we also had an incredible amount of fun and these beautiful experiences that I don't know if people get to have very often. I feel extremely grateful for that. We're mostly always in laughter and living in a comedy. That's how we went through our life. My life has not been a tragedy. It's been a large collection of many short stories of all genres."
John Sciulli/WireImage
Riley Keough and Lisa Marie Presley in West Hollywood in April 2012To finish From Here to the Great Unknown, Riley listened to 16 tapes of memories her mom had recorded.
"It was definitely emotional," she says. "How open and honest [my mom] was in the tapes is something that I envy and respect."
A striking moment in the book is when Riley writes that she wishes she could have been her mom's mother, and her grandmother Priscilla Presley's mom.
"It's not that I think I'm different or that I necessarily would be a better-suited mom," she explains. "It was more that I felt this deep love for them and felt that I wanted to take care of them. My mom was an incredible mother, and I often think about that when mothering my own daughter [Tupelo]. I certainly don't think I would make a better mom than anyone, but I just felt this sense of wanting to love her the way I knew she needed to be loved."
As for what's gotten her through the grieving process, Riley says it's just "feeling the grief" itself.
"It feels so scary, grief, and this bottomless pit of sadness," she says. "In the moments you can handle it, allow it. If you can't, it's OK to take breaks from it. It's a lifelong journey, I think."
With From Here to the Great Unknown — the audio book of which features clips of Lisa Marie's tapes and narration by Riley and Julia Roberts — now out in the world, Riley is looking at it as a "very cool thing to have for my family and for my daughter and her future children."
Next up, Riley will hit the road for a book tour kicking off Wednesday, Oct. 9, and running through Nov. 18.
"My mom's fans and Elvis fans were very important to my mom and to our family, and it's just an honor to get to sit there on her behalf, essentially," she says. "I'm looking forward to visiting all the cities and driving around the country."
From Here to the Great Unknown is available now.
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