Most new moms hold their baby for the first time and think one thing. Mine.
Lisa Marie Presley did too, at least partly. But when she finally wrote about those first days with her daughter, Riley, she described a feeling that went somewhere else entirely.
Some background first, for anyone who doesn’t know the family well. Lisa Marie was Elvis Presley’s only child. Her daughter, Riley Keough, was born on May 29, 1989, in Santa Monica, California. That made Riley Elvis’s first grandchild, and the world wanted a look at her.
It got one. In the memoir, Lisa Marie writes that a photo of baby Riley ran on the cover of People magazine with the line “ELVIS’S FIRST GRANDCHILD. HERE SHE IS!”
Lisa Marie was young. In her own words she was “a mother at twenty-one.”
The book where she says all this is called “From Here to the Great Unknown.” Lisa Marie started it, and after she passed away in January 2023, Riley finished it for her. It came out on Oct 8, 2024. So the pages about baby Riley were written by the mom and then carried to the finish line by the baby, all grown up.
Riley sat down with TODAY to talk about completing the book her mom couldn’t, and it’s worth hearing how she describes taking it on.
Riley Keough on finishing her mom’s memoir
What was it Lisa Marie felt when Riley arrived?
She starts with joy. “But when Riley was born, everybody was happy,” she writes. “She was such a special beacon, a unique spirit, a light in this universe.”
Then she goes deeper. “I think I was a vessel, serving another purpose.”
And here’s the line that stops you. “Riley was mine, but she was for everyone else, too.”
That’s a big thing for any mom to say. It’s even bigger coming from Elvis’s daughter, a woman who grew up knowing exactly what it meant to belong a little bit to the whole world. Her little girl was going to share that, and Lisa Marie seems to have known it from the start.
It didn’t make her love Riley any less. If anything, the opposite. “I fell in love with being a mom,” she wrote. “I realized I had been called to care for something else. Being a mom was everything to me and Riley was the most precious gem.”
The audiobook of the memoir is told in both of their voices, Lisa Marie’s and Riley’s, and this official sample lets you hear how the two of them sound side by side.
A sample of the audiobook in Lisa Marie’s and Riley’s voices
Riley is grown now. She’s an actress and a producer, and since August 2022 she’s been a mom herself, to a little girl named Tupelo.
At Lisa Marie’s memorial at Graceland in January 2023, Riley’s husband, Ben Smith-Petersen, read a letter she’d written to her mom. One line in it says, “I hope I can love my daughter the way you loved me, the way you loved my brother and my sisters.”
Read that next to what Lisa Marie wrote about baby Riley back in 1989, and it’s hard not to get a little misty. The girl the whole world wanted to see on a magazine cover is now hoping to be the kind of mom she had.