Riley Keough Reveals Bittersweet Process to Finish Mom Lisa Marie Presley's Memoir
🔗: https://t.co/xmKoCWSwEe
Riley Keough "burst into tears" while listening to the tapes her late mom Lisa Marie Presley had left behind to complete her memoir, 'From Here to the Great Unknown'. pic.twitter.com/XTC2qLHYgO
- People (@people) September 25, 2024
People magazine has a small interview and the introduction to Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumous memoir, written by her daughter Riley Keough. The book, From Here to the Great Unknown, is out October 8th and Riley's interview with Oprah will air that night on CBS.
Riley, 35, tells PEOPLE in an exclusive email interview: “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.”
“The tapes are an incredible portrait of the force of nature that she was,” Riley says of her mother. “I hope that in an extraordinary circumstance, people relate to a very human experience of love, heartbreak, loss, addiction and family. [My mom] wanted to write a book in the hopes that someone could read her story and relate to her, to know that they’re not alone in the world. Her hope with this book was just human connection. So that’s mine.”
In the years before she died, my mother, Lisa Marie Presley, began writing her memoir. Though she tried various approaches, and sat for many book interviews, she couldn’t figure out how to write about herself. 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. 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.
After she’d grown exceedingly frustrated, she said to me, “Pookie, I don’t know how to write my book anymore. Can you write it with me?”
“Of course I can,” I said.
The last 10 years of her life had been so brutally hard that she was only able to look back on everything through that lens. She felt I could have a more holistic view of her life than she could. So I agreed to help her with it, not thinking much of the commitment, assuming we would write it together over time.
A month later, she died.
Days and weeks and months of grief drifted by. Then I got the tapes of the memoir interviews she’d done. I was in my house, sitting on the couch. My daughter was sleeping. I was so afraid to hear my mother’s voice - the physical connection we have to the voices of our loved ones is profound. I decided to lie in my bed because I know how heavy grief makes my body feel.
I began listening to her speak.
It was incredibly painful but I couldn’t stop. It was like she was in the room, talking to me. I instantly felt like a child again and I burst into tears.
My mommy. The tone of her voice.
I was eight years old again, riding in our car. Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” came on the radio, and my dad pulled over and made us all get out to dance on the side of the road. I thought of my mom’s beautiful smile. Her laugh. I thought of my dad trying to resuscitate her lifeless body when he found her.
[...] 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.
There are times, too, where it sounds like she wants to burn the world to the ground; other times, she displays compassion and empathy - all facets of the woman who was my mother, each of those strands, beautiful and broken, forged together in early trauma, crashing together at the end of her life.
[...] Wherever possible, I wrote it exactly as she said it. In other cases, I've edited my mother's words for clarity or to get at what I know was the root of what she was trying to convey. [...] But there are things she doesn’t talk about in the tapes, things she didn’t get to, especially in the later part of her life.
The greatest strength for this aspect of the book was also one of my mother’s biggest flaws: She was constitutionally incapable of hiding anything from me.
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. [...] I aim not only to honor my mother, but to tell a human story in what I know is an extraordinary circumstance.
In his poem “Binsey Poplars (felled 1879),” Gerard Manley Hopkins writes of that set of chopped-down trees, “After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.”
I want this book to make clear the “beauty been” that was my mother.
Lisa Marie Presley’s daughter, Riley Keough, has reportedly completed her late mother’s memoir, fulfilling a request made by Presley just a month before her death. @chloemelas reports on the latest details. pic.twitter.com/BLRqQa21T5
- TODAY (@TODAYshow) September 25, 2024
Julia Roberts to Narrate Lisa Marie Presley's Memoir Audiobook That Features Late Star’s Unheard Interviews: ‘So Moved’ https://t.co/eRbyqfv4lQ
- People (@people) September 25, 2024
The audio book of FHTTGU will be read by Julia Roberts, with Riley reading her own portions and sections featuring Lisa Marie’s own recordings.
“I was so moved by Lisa Marie’s incredible memoir,” Roberts tells PEOPLE, in an exclusive statement. “It was a real privilege to give voice to her wild and beautiful life and I deeply appreciate Riley entrusting me with her mother’s story.”
“I’m so thrilled to have Julia be a part of this and read the voice of my mother. I couldn’t think of anyone more perfect to help share her story with the world,” Riley says.
Riley Keough Says Mom Lisa Marie Presley ‘Died of a Broken Heart’ After Son's Death (Exclusive) https://t.co/mXl8uCH291
- People (@people) September 25, 2024
In an email interview for this week's PEOPLE cover story, Riley discusses her brother Benjamin's death by suicide at age 27 in 2020, and how it played a role in her mom's death at age 53 three years later.
“My mom tried her best to find strength for me and my younger sisters after Ben died, but we knew how much pain she was in,” says Riley, 35. “My mom physically died from the after effects of her surgery, but we all knew she died of a broken heart.”
Lisa Marie was long vocal about her grief - she wrote that she’d never “move on” from Benjamin's death in an essay for PEOPLE in 2022 - and says in the memoir that she and Riley healed “by helping people. One kid wrote to Riley and said, ‘I didn’t kill myself last night because of what you said it would do to my family and those that are left behind. So thank you.' That helped me. That brought me up.”
Riley says she also found respite in Nick Cave’s 2016 documentary film One More Time with Feeling, which she describes as "a really beautiful portrayal of grief."
Riley says her brother's death "was incredibly difficult to write about, as was my mom’s descent into addiction. And her own death, of course."
Riley makes it clear, though, that her mom's story isn't "only about grief."
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You can read the full excerpt at Source, two, three, four, five