In her posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, Lisa Marie Presley reveals heart-wrenching details about the day her father, Elvis Presley, passed away at Graceland on August 16, 1977. Released on October 8, the memoir offers a poignant look back at the profound impact of that fateful day on her life.
Lisa Marie, who was only nine years old at the time, recounts the moment she ran to her father, only to be held back by others who were trying to revive him. “I was screaming bloody murder. I knew it was not good,” she writes, capturing the intense emotion of that tragic moment.
She vividly recalls hearing her paternal grandfather “wailing, wailing,” a sound that remains etched in her memory. “That noise. I’ll never get past that sound of him wailing. I could hear, ‘Oh, he’s gone. He’s gone.’”
The loss marked a pivotal moment in her life, leading her to reflect, “That was the day the music stopped — and my life as I knew it is completely over.” Elvis Presley died at the age of 42 due to complications related to drug use.
Tragically, more than 45 years later, Lisa Marie herself passed away on January 12, 2023, from a small bowel obstruction, a complication stemming from bariatric surgery she had years earlier. She was 54 years old.
In a touching commitment to her mother’s legacy, Lisa Marie’s daughter, actress Riley Keough, pledged to help complete the memoir before her mother’s death. In an exclusive email interview with PEOPLE, Riley expressed her desire to go beyond the public persona of her mother. “Because my mother was Elvis Presley’s daughter, she was constantly talked about, argued over, and dissected,” Riley, 35, explained. “What she wanted to do in her memoir… was to reveal the core of who she was.”
Riley aims to portray Lisa Marie as a multi-dimensional individual: “the best mother, a wild child, a fierce friend, an underrated artist,” capturing the complexities of her life filled with joy, trauma, and grief.
Throughout the memoir, Lisa Marie also shares her concerns about her father’s well-being. “I was always worried about my dad dying,” she confides. “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 recent interview with Oprah Winfrey, which aired on the same day as the memoir’s release, Riley discussed her mother’s struggle to cope with Elvis’s death. “Her grief was very… I don’t think she knew how to process it,” Riley revealed. “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 listening to her dad’s music.”
Lisa Marie’s memoir serves not only as a tribute to her father but also as a testament to her own life journey, offering fans a deeper understanding of the woman behind the legacy.
Related topics: