Actress Riley Keough discussed her mother’s death in depth for the first time in a sit-down interview with Oprah Winfrey at her family’s Graceland residence in a special that aired on CBS on October 8, the same day. From here to the great unknown, the posthumous memoir of Keough’s late mother, Lisa Marie Presley, the only child of rock icon Elvis Presley and Priscilla Presley, went on sale. Keough finished the book by listening to hours of tapes her mother recorded for the book before she died of cardiac arrest on January 12, 2023 at the age of 54.

In An Oprah special: The Presleys – Elvis, Lisa Marie and Riley, Keough, the daughter of Lisa Marie and actor and musician Danny Keough, was in tears as she listened to audio of her mother talking about her relationship with Michael Jackson, to whom she was married from 1994 to 1996.

“I can only speak to my experience with Michael and my experience was that he was nothing but kind and loving to me and my family, and I saw them in a seemingly happy, loving relationship,” she told Winfrey.

However, much of Lisa Marie’s life was filled with sad memories, starting with the death of her father in 1977, when she was just 9 years old. Despite the sudden nature of Lisa Marie’s death, she attended the Golden Globes just two days earlier in honor of the 2022 biopic Elvis — Keough recalled worrying about her mother’s health in the days before.

“There were a few times I was with her in the last three weeks that she was alive that I was worried,” she said. “I think there was always some sort of undertone for me because of the feeling that I was on borrowed time with her. But there were a few interactions with her where she just felt distant in a way, a kind of resignation.

Asked by Winfrey if it felt like her mother, who had temporarily developed an opioid addiction after giving birth to twin daughters Harper and Finley in 2008, was using drugs again, Keough replied, “It didn’t feel like drugs.” I have a lot of experience with the medicines. It felt like a tired person.”

The idea of ​​borrowed time with her mother stemmed from the death of Keough’s younger brother Benjamin, Lisa Marie’s only son. In July 2020, Benjamin died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at the age of 27. The memoir details how Lisa Marie kept her son’s body in a coffin in their home for weeks before taking him to Graceland for burial, preserving his remains with dry ice. “What would happen, she would just sit with the body,” Winfrey asked, to which Keough responded in the affirmative.

“The moment my brother died, I thought, ‘This is the end of her,’ because they were so close. They were as close as Elvis was to his mother, and I couldn’t imagine a world where she could get by without him,” she recalled.

Keough also talked about the anger she once felt toward her grandfather, Elvis, when she saw her mother in a constant state of grief over his death.

“I had a mother who felt like, how can you leave me in a way, and I lived with that,” she said. “I was young, but I kind of associated him with my mother feeling pain, so I remember being young and feeling frustrated because he did that.”

It’s one of the many reasons why Keough has a difficult relationship with Graceland, to which she is now the sole heir.

“Normally I don’t feel like coming here, and I have to kind of force myself to come,” she admitted. “And when I am here, I really feel a sense of connection when I sit in the meditation garden.”

Elvis, her brother Ben and her mother Lisa Marie are all buried in Graceland’s meditation garden, where her grandmother Priscilla says she also wants to be buried. As for the future of the tourist attraction, which attracts about 2,000 visitors a day, Keough says she plans to honor what she believes would have been her mother’s wishes.

“My instinct with everything is always to do what my mother would have wanted, which is to keep it a home,” Keough said. “It was our family’s home.”