If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, SheKnows may receive an affiliate commission.
Following the death of her mother Lisa Marie Presley, Riley Keough accepted a unique and “incredibly painful” task: to finish her memoir without her. Of course, doing so is no easy feat, after all, while trying to grieve her mother, she was constantly reminded, through interviews and recordings, about how incredible her mom was and just how much she missed her.
“It was incredibly painful but I couldn’t stop,” the Daisy Jones & The Six star wrote in the memoir’s introduction, per People. “It was like she was in the room, talking to me. I instantly felt like a child again and I burst into tears.”
According to Keough, Presley had been wanting to write her memoir, titled From Here to the Great Unknown, for a while but had grown frustrated with the process.
“Though she tried various approaches, and sat for many book interviews, she couldn’t figure out how to write about herself,” Keough said of her mom, who passed away in January 2023 at age 54. “She didn’t find herself interesting, even though, of course, she was. She didn’t like talking about herself. She was insecure. She wasn’t sure what her value to the public was other than being Elvis’s daughter.”
“She was so wracked with self-criticism that working on the book became incredibly difficult for her,” Keough continued. “I don’t think she fundamentally understood how or why her story should be told. And yet, she felt a burning desire to tell it.”
With frustrations reaching an all-time high, Keough, who always shared a close relationship with her mother, was asked to help her out. Then, a month later, her mom unexpectedly passed away.
Speaking of the memoir itself, which will be released on Oct. 8 and is currently available for pre-order, Keough said her mom shared everything about her life in “raw” tapes, from her relationships to her connection with her father, Elvis Presley.
“The early parts of the book are mostly her voice — in the tapes, she speaks at length about her Graceland childhood, the death of her father, the dreadful aftermath, her relationship with her mother, her difficult teen years,” Keough listed. “She’s frank and funny about my father, Danny Keough. She talks openly about her relationship with Michael Jackson. She’s painfully candid about her later drug addiction and about the perils of fame.”
‘From Here to the Great Unknown’ by Lisa Marie Presley & Riley Keough
According to Keough, those stories will have readers seeing Lisa Marie in a while new light.
“I hope that in telling her story, my mother will resolve into a three-dimensional character, into the woman we knew and loved so dearly,” the actress said. “I’ve come to understand that her burning desire to tell her story was born of a need to both understand herself and be understood by others in full, for the first time in her life.”
“I aim not only to honor my mother but to tell a human story in what I know is an extraordinary circumstance,” she added.
From Here to the Great Unknown by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough is available for pre-order today.
Before you go, click here to see all the best celebrity memoirs you can read right now.
