The world was shocked and saddened by the sudden passing of Lisa Marie Presley in January 2023, at the age of just 54.
Her daughter, actress Riley Keough, has honoured her memory by helping to complete her memoir which has now officially hit shelves.
Titled From Here to the Great Unknown, the book chronicles Lisa Marie’s tumultuous life.
The memoir was officially released on 8 October 2024, and with its release came multiple bombshell revelations and unknown moments that occurred behind closed doors.
One such moment was Lisa Marie’s emotional reaction to her father, Elvis Presley’s death on 16 August 1977.
“I ran to him, but somebody grabbed me, pulled me back. They were trying to work on him,” she wrote in the book. “I was screaming bloody murder. I knew it was not good.”
At just nine years old, she thought “my life as I knew it is completely over.”
Another bombshell revelation in From Here To The Great Unknown was that Lisa Marie kept her son, Benjamin Keough‘s body on dry ice for two months after his death at the age of 27 in 2020.
“There is no law in the state of California that you have to bury someone immediately,” she wrote, while Riley went on to share that it was “really important” for her mother to “have ample time to say goodbye to him, the same way she’d done with her dad.”
Lisa Marie said they had to keep the room with Benjamin’s body at 55 degrees, and was conflicted over where to bury him: Hawaii or Graceland.
“That was part of why it took so long,” she wrote. “I got so used to him, caring for him and keeping him there. I think it would scare the living f—ing piss out of anybody else to have their son there like that. But not me.”
She went on to say, “I felt so fortunate that there was a way that I could still parent him, delay it a bit longer so that I could become okay with laying him to rest.”
It was also revealed in her memoir that Lisa Marie Presley had an addiction to prescription painkillers following the birth of her twin daughters, Harper and Finley Lockwood, in 2008.
“It escalated to 80 pills a day,” Lisa Marie wrote. “It took more and more to get high, and I honestly don’t know when your body decides it can’t deal with it anymore. But it does decide at some point.”
Lisa Marie added that for a couple of years her drug use was “recreational,” until one day “it wasn’t.”
“It was an absolute matter of addiction, withdrawal in the big leagues,” she shared. “I just wanted to check out. It was too painful to be sober.”
According to PEOPLE magazine, Lisa Marie first asked for Riley’s assistance in finishing the memoir in 2022.
The Graceland website released a statement in January 2024 where they confirmed the upcoming book and gave details about the mother-daughter collaboration.
“Like most of us do with asks from our parents, Riley pushed off the project, feeling that there would be a right time for them to sit down together and finish it.
“But, after Lisa Marie’s unexpected death last year, Riley carried a guilt that the world would never know the loving, joyful, and caring woman that she knew and grieved.”
Luckily, Lisa Marie had recorded numerous hours worth of tape for the book, and Riley decided it was time for the world to hear her mother’s story.
Riley told PEOPLE, “Because my mother was Elvis Presley’s daughter, she was constantly talked about, argued over and dissected.
“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.”
From Here to the Great Unknown is available now. Buy your copy here.
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