When Elvis Presley’s only child, Lisa Marie, died last year at age 54, she left behind an intimate request: that daughter Riley Keough complete her memoir based on recorded tapes and their time together.

On the day the book was released, 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 made me emotional that she shared it with the world because it was a story that she felt very protective of,” Keough, a soft-spoken 35-year-old actress, said Tuesday.

In the memoir, Lisa Marie Presley describes the toll that the death of her legendary father – when she was just nine – 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 saw the bathroom floor.

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

“There have been nights as an adult where I would just get drunk, listen to his music and sit there and cry. The sadness 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 seeing her mother in pain, even so many years after his death.

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

The death of Lisa Marie Presley’s son Ben Keough, who committed suicide in July 2020 at the age of 27, sparked such intense 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 her mother’s life” and they “shared a very deep bond of soul,” Keough wrote of her brother.

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

“I think it’s quite common that the way we deal with death in the Western world is very quick and there’s not really a grieving process,” she said. I don’t see anything. It’s not the way it’s done so often in other places.”

Presley’s health took a turn for the worse after her son’s death and funeral. Keough writes in the book that she believed her mother would eventually die of a broken heart.

Presley first 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, she says in the book. They worked out a secret phone call routine and began meeting regularly.

During an eight-day trip to Las Vegas, she went to his room every night and they continued to talk and watch movies. “Nothing happened physically, but the connection was so crazy strong. No one had ever seen that side of him,” she says.

On the last night, he turned off the lights in the hotel room and proposed. “And in the dark, Michael said, ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I’m completely 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 divorcing Keough’s father, Danny.

But the couple often argued about Jackson’s suspected drug use, Presley writes. He became secretive and “terrible,” disappearing for days — behavior she recognized from her father.

“It was very passionate and basically went up in flames. I know they both cared about each other very much, and there were a lot of things going on,” Keough said.

Presley’s short-lived and tumultuous third marriage, to actor Nicolas Cage, lasted just 108 days. This is reflected in the book, with no direct mention of the American actor on the tapes.

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

She remembers Cage bringing diamonds for her mother 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 couldn’t have rushed the marriage and sometimes I regret rushing the divorce”.

Presley moved to England for “her last chance at stability” with her fourth husband Michael Lockwood, Keough says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It also doesn’t address the family’s financial problems, including high-profile battles over the Graceland estate.

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

“I’m aware that there’s a lot of tragedy in the book, but I think we’ve all had a very wonderfully joyful, colorful, funny, crazy life too,” she said. “I’m just grateful to be here. .”

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