Riley Keough on finishing her mom Lisa Marie Presley's memoir
From Here to the Great Unknown looks at what it was actually like being Elvis Presley's daughter
On the day Lisa Marie Presley was born in Memphis, Tenn., there was a wall of paparazzi waiting outside the hospital to take her photo. As the only child of Elvis and Priscilla Presley, and the heir to America's biggest musical legacy, there would be nothing normal about her life.
In late 2022, Lisa Marie set out to write a memoir and asked her daughter Riley Keough for help. A month later, Lisa Marie was dead at age 54, and Keough took it upon herself to finish her mother's final project, relying on hours of audio tapes that were left behind. That memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, is out now.
"When she passed, it just kind of felt like this task that needed to be completed," Keough says in an interview with Q's Tom Power. "It felt a little bit daunting and I knew it was going to be incredibly emotional. I didn't necessarily want to do it in the beginning, but I felt it was something I had to do."
In the book, Keough writes about how hard her mother was on herself, and how she questioned whether her story was worth telling at all.
"I'm sure that growing up in the public eye and being the headline on every trash magazine saying horrible things about you certainly didn't help," Keough tells Power. "She was extremely insecure, but I do think she always was. I don't know if it has to do with the situation she grew up in and the attention that came to her that she didn't really want … but she was very insecure."
Growing up, Lisa Marie was incredibly attached to Elvis, who died in August 1977, when he was 42 and she was nine. Keough believes her mother never really processed the loss. "She was a daddy's girl," Keough says. "The loss of him was incredibly painful and it was something that she carried with her throughout her life."
Keough's father, musician Danny Keough, who was married to Lisa Marie from 1988 to 1994, told his daughter that her mother never talked about Elvis.
"She grew up with people just wanting to know about [her father's death], so naturally, she felt protective of it," Keough says. "She wasn't trusting of people. But again, she did have this strange duality where she would be extremely trusting of people and naive in certain situations, so I think she wanted to connect with people."
The type of fame that Lisa Marie had was unique because she was born into it. "With my family … there was never an experience of anything else," Keough says. "There's no alternative. So, I mean, it's definitely a unique situation."
Though the last name Presley provided Lisa Marie with fame, fortune and influence, it also came with major disadvantages. She became addicted to opioids and painkillers following the birth of her twin daughters, Finley and Harper Lockwood, in 2008, and fame acted as a barrier to her recovery.
"She could do whatever she wanted," Keough says. "She just had more power than your average person does. And when you're an addict, it can be dangerous. There were times that I would try and intervene unsuccessfully, but it was an uphill battle."
Now, when Keough wants to remember her mother and feel present with her, she goes to Graceland and listens to the sound of her voice. "I have her tapes," she says. "Mostly, I listen to songs she would listen to. Sometimes I'll listen to her music."
The full interview with Riley Keough is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with Riley Keough produced by Vanessa Greco.
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