For years, singer/songwriter Lisa Marie Presley, the only child of Elvis Presley, refused to write a memoir; she told people she thought her life wasn’t interesting enough to fill a book.

"I think she's had a complicated relationship with existing in the public eye and wanting to connect to people and share her story, but also really not enjoying having attention on her," Lisa Marie's daughter, Riley Keough says.

Eventually, Lisa Marie changed her mind about the memoir. She began making audio recordings about her life and reached out to Keough for help with the project. A month later, in January 2023, Lisa Marie died suddenly, and Keough had to decide whether or not to complete the book.

"I received the tapes. And then I kind of put it off for a while because I was like, why am I doing this to myself?" Keough says. "But the project of the book really felt like a duty to me. ... It felt like just a task that had to be done, so then I think I approached it in that way."

The book, From Here to the Great Unknown, takes its title from a lyric from the song “Where No One Stands Alone,” featured on a 2018 compilation album of Lisa Marie singing duets with archival recordings of her father's favorite gospel songs. In the book, Lisa Marie describes growing up in Graceland and shock of losing her father when she was 9. She also looks back on her three marriages, her battle with addiction and the loss of her son, Benjamin Keough, who died by suicide in 2020.

Keough, who is listed as a co-author of the memoir, says she struggled throughout to capture her mother's voice.

"[Lisa Marie] was very complicated and she was very candid and honest and raw and tough and wild and rebellious," Keough says. "But she also had a side to her that was very sort of childlike and naïve as well. And [she was] one of the most loving people I've ever met. But also I don't know if she could ever receive love, which was interesting."

Interview highlights

On Lisa Marie’s relationship to her parents, Elvis and Priscilla

I think that she was so close with her father, like she was a daddy's girl and he was everything to her that the loss of him was so great. And I think that dictated the relationship she had with her mother. …

Priscilla was a very young mother, and obviously my grandmother was living in this world that was totally overwhelming and unusual and she [had] to be Elvis' wife. And I think there was a lot of pressure on her to be perfect and to be the perfect wife and woman that ever lived. … And I think that my mom and her were very different. Like my mother was very wild and unruly and rebellious and radical kind of, and [Priscilla] was very well mannered and perfect, kind of the opposite of my mom, so I think they would butt heads often. … I also think that that had to do with the fact that she was in grief, too, so I think that she was acting out. She was angry at the universe for taking her father away and that everything and everyone was not him.

On Lisa Marie’s account of the day Elvis died in 1977

She always felt protective over that story. I always got the sense that she would never share the details of that day publicly, but then when I got the tapes, I heard that she wanted to share the details of that day. …

She basically came into my grandfather's room and he was in his bathroom and she saw him in there and then somebody grabbed her and brought her out into her room. And the ambulance came. And I think she says she went to smoke a cigarette. She was 9 years old. And then she watched him get brought down the stairs on a gurney. And she kind of says she remembers seeing his shoes or his hand or something like that. And he gets wheeled out of the house. And then a few moments later, his father, Vernon, basically, she hears him yelling and saying, “My baby's gone” … and I think Vernon said, “Your daddy's gone.”

On the family grieving alongside the public

The whole world was grieving her father, and she talks about watching people come through the house and people fainting and having to be carried out and ambulances coming to get people. ... I think it was a very interesting way to grieve. And I think that it kind of maybe didn't leave her a lot of room for her own grief.

On Lisa Marie’s connection to Graceland

She was very happy to be at Graceland. And in general, like if we were in Memphis, she just loved it there. She wanted a house there. And it was where she grew up and had some of her best memories as a child. We always had a lot of fun there. We would have dinners there and Thanksgiving and when the tours were over, obviously we would hang out in the house and they would take the ropes down and it was just like a family home for us. We would hang out in the living rooms and me and my brother would run downstairs and play pool with our cousins. And so we got to experience it as a home growing up. … And her father's room, which has never been part of the tour, her room in her father's room are upstairs in the house, and it's really only been a few people who are allowed up there and just our family. And she kept a key with her, and it was just a place that she went. It was like a place of comfort for her. I think she really felt her father in the room.

On Lisa Marie’s marriage to Michael Jackson being questioned as a publicity stunt

Their love was very genuine and they were in love and they were in a real relationship and slept in bed together and were very normal. But I think that when you're that famous, there's a lot of people around. I think both camps kind of had people in their ears about each other. My mom started to perceive that maybe he was on drugs and he started to maybe get the idea that she was on to him maybe being on drugs. And then I think there was paranoia. I think my grandmother was apprehensive about the marriage and brought that idea up to my mom, and I think it just kind of exploded.

On Riley’s relationship Jackson

I think my mom says something in the book that people might kind of pass over, which is really kind of indicative of the whole thing, which is that like the version of Michael that was in her/our lives or that she was with, was different to, I think, the version that he presented on TV. Even the way he spoke was different. Probably with Elvis, too: There's the version of Elvis Presley for the world and then there's the version at home. And I think my experience with Michael was he felt like a human being and spoke differently. I remember the first time I saw him on TV, his register was higher and that's not how I was used to hearing him. And I remember thinking: That was interesting. So I think that in my life he felt like my mom's husband, like a stepfather.

On Lisa Marie seeing Elvis impersonators at her shows

She used to, before shows, peek out the side of the curtain and and find where they would be so that she wasn't surprised when she went out there and she would just peek around and kind of go, OK, there's one in the back, there's one over there so she wasn't shocked. … It's like some kind of wild fever dream to go out on stage and perform to your dead father, or like someone in costume. It's bizarre. People's relationship to him was as if he was like this sort of like God, you know? And so I don't think there was a lot of humanizing going on with her. It's not that they had ill intentions. I think that they're just fans and just maybe didn't realize how weird that would be for her.

Therese Madden and Anna Bauman produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.

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