The biggest reveals in Lisa Marie Presley’s memoir

Her heart never healed after losing Elvis. That was always evident as Lisa Marie Presley clumsily searched for love and contentment in her abbreviated life.
But in Presley’s raw new memoir “From Here to the Great Unknown” (Random House, 281 pp., on sale Tuesday), completed by her daughter Riley Keough after Lisa Marie’s death at age 54, the tragedy is amplified and repeated. It’s a compelling but relentlessly depressing read.
The book, transcribed from tapes of Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s only child frankly discussing her life, is written in vignettes that alternate between mother and daughter’s voices. Roughly a third of the book focuses on Lisa Marie’s childhood years, both with and without her dad and detailing her fraught relationship with her mom, and a sizable section is devoted to Michael Jackson.
There are large gaps in the timeline – most notably, her marriages to Nicolas Cage and Michael Lockwood – that are glancingly filled in by Keough, who also provides insight for Lisa Marie’s eventual addiction and, later, her son Ben Keough’s suicide. Though her love of music is clear, surprisingly little is said about her career.
Among the book’s biggest revelations:
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How to watch:Oprah interviews Elvis’ granddaughter Riley Keough on CBS
“I wrote a poem with the line, ‘I hope my daddy doesn’t die,’“ she remembers. Among many incidents, she describes finding him face down on the floor of his bathroom. He had tried to steady himself on a towel rack, which broke and he collapsed.
The last time she saw Elvis alive, she was coming in from playing racquetball. Her dad gave her a hug and a kiss, they exchanged I love yous, and he told her, “Go to bed.”
She woke to a commotion and Elvis was whisked away on a stretcher. Lisa Marie, 9, went to her bedroom, nervously smoked a cigarette and awaited word. An hour later, she heard her grandfather Vernon wailing, “He’s gone, he’s gone.”
“My life as I knew it was completely over,” she wrote, realizing later, “He’s dead and now I’m stuck with her,” meaning Priscilla.
Adds Riley, “I remember when I was little feeling angry at Elvis for leaving my mother and for causing all this pain.”
When she was 10, Lisa Marie says, her mother’s boyfriend Michael Edwards, a model and actor, came into her room in the middle of the night. “He said he was going to teach me what was going to happen when I got older,” she says in the book. “He was putting his hand on my chest and saying a man’s going to touch here, then he put his hand between my legs and he said they’re going to touch you here.” She recalls him gently kissing her and leaving.
Priscilla was furious when Lisa Marie revealed the incident and called her daughter in so Edwards could apologize. “In Europe that’s how they teach the kids, so that’s what I was doing,” he told her.
But the abuse didn’t stop. “He would touch me and spank me, telling me not to look” and leaving her with a bruised bottom. “I assume he was jerking off,” Lisa Marie says. When Priscilla would confront him, “He’d say, ‘Oh, I was drunk’ or ‘She was actually flirting with me.’”
“I was eleven, twelve, thirteen,” Lisa Marie says.
Once, he complained about Lisa Marie leaving her underwear on the dryer and she shot back, “It’s not like you’re not enjoying that.” She says he responded by throwing a dining room chair at her, striking her in the back.
“These claims are absolutely untrue. I never molested Lisa Marie and am shocked at the suggestion that I did,” Edwards said in a statement provided to USA TODAY on Oct. 10. “I was encouraged to embellish a harmless anecdote about Lisa Marie in my memoir from the 1980s and now regret that I did. I understand that these stories sell books, but the notion that I molested Lisa Marie is just a fabrication.”
USA TODAY has reached out to Priscilla Presley’s representative for comment.
With their relationship deteriorating, Lisa Marie recalls her relief when Priscilla told her to pack her bags in the middle of the night and dropped her off.
“The first morning I removed the large mirror from the wall, called my coke dealer and invited him and about six or seven other people over,” she says in the memoir. “We proceeded to have a four-day bender in that room.”
But for the most part, “Scientology actually helped,” she says. “The church felt radical in an exciting way − it didn’t feel like an organized religion, really. It attracted cool, unusual, artistic people. It became my tribe.”
She calls her abortion “the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my whole life,” and soon after, the couple broke up.
So “I planned and I plotted and I schemed. I pinpointed exactly when I was ovulating” and met up with Danny as his band played a gig on a cruise ship. Two weeks later, with a positive pregnancy test in hand, “Danny knew he had to marry me. I trapped him. I didn’t really mean to, but I did.”
He’d chastely kissed Tatum O’Neal and Brooke Shields, and “he said Madonna had tried to hook up with him once, too, but nothing happened,” Lisa Marie says.
“I was terrified, because I didn’t want to make the wrong move. When he decided to first kiss me, he just did it. He was instigating everything. The physical stuff started happening, which I was shocked at. I had thought that maybe we wouldn’t do anything until we got married, but he said, ‘I’m not waiting!’“
Lisa Marie recalls their early time together as idyllic: honeymooning in Orlando and going to Disney World every other day. “I was actually so happy,” she says. “I’ve never been that happy again.”
“There was an energy there, something about him that was truly remarkable, something that I’ve never ever seen or felt in my entire life, other than with my dad. … I fell in love with him because he was normal.”
As for the allegations of child molestation? “I never saw a goddamn thing like that. I personally would’ve killed him if I had.”
She brought Ben home after his suicide in 2020. “I got so used to him, caring for him and keeping him there” in a 55-degree room, she says.
Lisa Marie and Riley decided to get Ben’s name tattooed on their collarbones and hands, just as he had theirs tattooed on him. When the artist asked if they had photos showing the position of the ink, what happened next floored Riley.
“I’ve had an extremely absurd life, but this moment is in the top five,” Riley writes. Lisa Marie ushered the artist inside to open Ben’s casket and check out his tattoos firsthand.
“Soon after that, we all kind of got this vibe from my brother that he didn’t want his body in this house anymore,” Riley writes. “‘Guys,’ he seemed to be saying, ‘this is getting weird.’“
At the worst of Lisa Marie’s drug addiction, which began after the birth of her twin girls in 2008, she was consuming 80 pills a day.
“My whole life had blown up, it felt like one thing after another, and I could not take any more beatings,” she says in the memoir.
She would frequently travel to Graceland to sleep in Elvis’ bed, Riley writes. She was “desperate to feel protected, desperate to connect with her father. … It was the feeling of going to church when all is lost and saying, ‘Please, Jesus, help me.’“
With her health failing, Ben rented a tour bus in Nashville to drive Lisa Marie and the twins to LA, where her doctors were. “We drove because I wanted to do cocaine the whole time and couldn’t if I was on an airplane,” she says. “I didn’t think I could even get through airport security.”
While in rehab, Lisa Marie underwent the weight-loss bariatric surgery that eventually led to her death from a small bowel obstruction.
“I think something is wrong with me mentally or something like that,” Ben told her. “I think I have a mental health issue.”
Numbed by drinking and drugs, he hadn’t recognized the depth of his depression until it was too late, Riley writes. “He hadn’t gone to therapy, not even once. And he certainly hadn’t attempted suicide before − no overdose, nothing. No cry for help.”
Somehow, Lisa Marie remained sober, though “we all knew my mom was going to die of a broken heart,” Riley writes.
(This story has been updated to add new information.)
This article discusses suicide and sexual assault. If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 or chat at 988lifeline.org.
If you are a survivor of sexual assault, RAINN offers support through the National Sexual Assault Hotline (800.656.HOPE and online.rainn.org).