Lisa Marie Presley describes the day Elvis died in her posthumous memoir

When Elvis Presley's only child, Lisa Marie, died last year at the age of 54, she left behind a fervent wish: that daughter Riley Keough complete her memoirs based on tapes and their time together.

On the day of the book's release, the BBC met with Keough in New York to discuss From Here to the Great Unknown, a life story filled with trauma, addiction, loss and grief.

“It moved me that she shared it with the world because it was a story that she was very protective of,” Keough, a soft-spoken 35-year-old actress, said Tuesday.

In the memoir, Lisa Marie Presley describes the toll the death of her legendary father – when she was just nine years old – took on her.

For the first time, she describes waking up on the afternoon he died in August 1977 and sensing something was wrong before running into her father's room across the hall and finding him face down lying on the bathroom floor.

His body was displayed in an open casket at Graceland for two days. After the crowd left, Lisa Marie Presley went and “touched his face and held his hand to talk to him.”

“As an adult, there were nights where I would just get drunk, listen to his music and sit there and cry. The grief still comes. “It’s still there,” she says.

It's an event Keough believes her mother never fully processed.

She told the BBC that as a child she was angry with her famous grandfather because she associated his songs with watching her mother suffer, even so many years after his death.

While there are also memories of tender, private moments at Graceland, tragedy is a constant theme in the story.

The death of Lisa Marie Presley's son Ben Keough, who took his own life in July 2020 at the age of 27, caused such grief that his body was kept on dry ice in the family home for two months before it was finally buried .

“Ben was the love of my life” and they “had a very deep soul connection,” writes Keough about her brother.

She told the BBC that having more time with his body helped her mother “organize her thoughts.”

“I think that in the Western world it's pretty common to deal with death very quickly and there's no real grieving process,” she said. “The body will be taken away and the doors will be closed and you.” I don't see anything. It’s not like it’s done that much in other places.”

Presley's health deteriorated after her son's death and funeral. Keough writes in the book that she believed her mother would ultimately die of a broken heart.

Presley met pop icon Michael Jackson when she was six years old. Her father performed at the Hilton in Las Vegas and the Jackson 5 performed nearby.

They met again in 1993, when she was 25, and hit it off, the book says. They developed a secret phone calling routine and began meeting regularly.

During an eight-day trip to Las Vegas, she went to his room every night and they stayed up talking and watching movies. “Physically nothing happened, but the connection was so incredibly strong. Nobody had ever seen this side of him,” she says.

On the last evening he turned off the lights in the hotel room and proposed to her. “And in the darkness, Michael said, 'I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm madly in love with you.' I want us to get married and for you to have my children.

Lisa Marie agreed and they married in 1994. It was her second marriage after she divorced Keough's father Danny.

But the couple often argued over Jackson's alleged drug use, Presley writes. He became secretive and “terrible” and would disappear for days at a time – behavior she recognized from her father.

“It was very passionate and just burst into flames. I know they both cared deeply for each other and there were a lot of things at play,” Keough said.

Presley's short-lived and tumultuous third marriage to actor Nicolas Cage lasted just 108 days. This is reflected in the book, without the American actor being directly mentioned on the tapes.

Keough writes that she “doesn’t know if they were really in love, even though she said they were.”

She remembers Cage bringing her mother diamonds and every time he showed up, it was in a different colored car, usually a Lamborghini.

Cage said in a 2003 interview, “Sometimes I wish we hadn't rushed the marriage, and sometimes I regret rushing the divorce.”

According to Keough, Presley moved to England with her fourth husband, Michael Lockwood, for “their final attempt at stability.”

She bought a historic property in Rotherfield and took up gardening, cooking and also enjoyed drinking tea by the fireplace.

The first few years of a “sweet little life in the country” were “magical,” she writes, but overall the move was unhealthy for her.

She became distant from her friends, the loneliness and isolation took their toll, and her drug use increased.

Lisa Marie had only cited two friends during that period: the late English guitarist Jeff Beck and the former Duchess of York Sarah Ferguson, who gave a moving tribute at her funeral.

The book does not fully address the reported falling out between Presley and her mother, Priscilla Presley, but it is clear that they had a difficult relationship.

“I was immediately a pain in the ass to her and always felt like she didn’t want me,” Presley says in the opening chapter.

Nor is it about the family's financial difficulties, including the high-profile disputes over the Graceland estate.

However, Keough told the BBC she hopes readers develop the ability to relate to “very human things that happen, like addiction, grief, love, mothers, daughters and family.”

“I realize there is a lot of tragedy in the book, but I think we all also had really wonderfully joyful, colorful, funny and crazy lives,” she said. “I'm just grateful to be here.”

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