Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumous autobiography is being published and in it she describes the day her father, Elvis, died in August 1977.
The memoir From Here To The Great Unknown was started before Lisa Marie died herself in January 2023. It’s been completed by her daughter Riley Keough using tapes her mother recorded before she died.
As you’d expect, the chapter dealing with her father’s death is particularly harrowing.
Those of us who were alive all remember what we were doing on the day her daddy died. Lisa Marie was right there in the room. She was just nine years old.
"I ran to him, but somebody grabbed me, pulled me back. They were trying to work on him," she writes. "I was screaming bloody murder. I knew it was not good."
Lisa Marie also remembers how she could hear her paternal grandfather, Vernon Presley, "wailing".
"That noise. I'll never get past that sound of him wailing. I could hear, 'Oh he's gone. He's gone,'" the singer continues. "My life as I knew it (was) completely over".
The memoir also reveals how, even as a young child, Lisa Marie was concerned about her father’s health. "I was always worried about my dad dying," she writes. "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.'"
Keough has been doing the media rounds to promote the book, including an interview with Oprah Winfrey in which she discussed her mother’s lifelong grief.
"Her grief was very... I don't think she knew how to process it," she said. "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 she'd listen to her dad's music."
There’s more, a lot more, in the book. Lisa Marie describes life in Graceland as somewhat chaotic. Her home was “like its own city, its own jurisdiction. My dad was the chief of police, and everybody was ranked. There were a few laws and rules, but mostly not.” Then there was her brief marriage to Michael Jackson in the mid-90s. “I fell in love with him because he was normal,” she writes, somewhat startlingly.
