Imagine hearing your mother’s voice again after she’s gone, telling you everything she never got to say.
For Riley Keough, that’s exactly what happened.
Before her sudden death in January 2023 at just 54, Lisa Marie Presley had been working on a memoir. She recorded hours of audio about her life, her family and her father, Elvis.
She never got to finish it. So Riley did.
Riley listened to every tape, shaped her mother’s words into a book, and added her own memories in between. The result, From Here to the Great Unknown, was released in October 2024 and became a bestseller.
The audiobook has a beautiful touch too. Riley reads her own sections, while Julia Roberts reads Lisa Marie’s.
The heart of the book is Lisa Marie’s love for her father.
To the world, Elvis was a legend. To her, he was the dad who spoiled her rotten at Graceland and lit up every room he walked into. Her memories of him are warm, funny and deeply personal.
Then everything changed. Lisa Marie was just nine years old and at Graceland when Elvis died in August 1977. She writes about how that loss followed her for the rest of her life.
A deep dive into Lisa Marie’s memoir
The book doesn’t polish the hard parts. Lisa Marie opens up about her four marriages, including her headline-grabbing marriage to Michael Jackson in the 1990s, which she describes with surprising honesty and tenderness.
She’s equally open about her long struggle with addiction and how it affected her and her children.
The most painful chapter is about her son, Benjamin Keough, who died in 2020 at 27.
Lisa Marie was devastated. The book reveals that she couldn’t bear to let him go right away and kept his body at home for about two months before he was buried. It’s a shocking detail, but in context it reads as pure, raw grief from a mother who wasn’t ready to say goodbye.
Benjamin was later laid to rest at Graceland, near Elvis. Lisa Marie was buried beside them in 2023.
In the end, this isn’t just a celebrity memoir. It’s a conversation between a mother and daughter that death couldn’t stop.
Lisa Marie grew up as the most famous little girl in the world. Through Riley, she finally got to tell her story in her own words.