Riley Keough has spent her whole life inside one of the most famous families in America. She was born in 1989, the oldest child of Lisa Marie Presley, who was Elvis and Priscilla’s only child. That makes Riley Elvis’s granddaughter.
These days she’s an actress and a mom herself. And when she talks about motherhood, she keeps coming back to one person.
In November 2024 Riley sat down on stage at a Los Angeles book event with author Taylor Jenkins Reid. If that name rings a bell, Reid wrote “Daisy Jones & the Six,” the novel behind the 2023 TV show Riley starred in. The two women were there to talk about “From Here to the Great Unknown,” the memoir Lisa Marie started and Riley finished.
Live Talks Los Angeles taped the conversation in front of an audience on Nov 18, 2024, and streamed it a week later, on Nov 25.
At one point the talk turned to how Riley was raised. Lisa Marie, she explained, raised her the way Lisa Marie herself had been raised.
“I think it is from the south, but whatever way she was parented was how I was parented in a sense,” Riley said.
Then came the part that matters to every mom and grandma reading this. At the time Riley’s daughter, Tupelo, was 2. Riley and her husband, Ben Smith-Petersen, had welcomed their little girl in 2022. And Riley said she’s carrying the family style forward.
“And I also now sort of parent that way.”
So what is that way? She’s tried to put a label on it before.
“I think that I always say it’s this southern style of parenting, but it’s actually very specifically my family.”
And then she described it, in words you probably wouldn’t expect from a Hollywood star talking about the Presley household:
“It’s really loving and tactile and smothering, no boundaries.”
Smothering. No boundaries. She said it with love, and anyone who grew up in a hugging, kissing, always-in-your-business kind of family will know exactly what she meant.
It fits with what we’ve heard from Lisa Marie herself. She once admitted her own kids had to wriggle out from under all the affection she gave them. Now it’s Riley’s turn, and by her own account the apple hasn’t fallen far.
She also talked about the memoir. Riley said she put the way her family in the South talked to each other into the book, because it helped show the family’s “wildness.”
You can hear Riley in her own voice, warm and funny, in the full conversation from that evening. It runs long, so pour a cup of coffee and settle in with Riley and Taylor Jenkins Reid as they talk about her mom and the book.
Riley Keough’s full talk with Taylor Jenkins Reid in Los Angeles
There’s something sweet about it. Elvis’s granddaughter, a grown woman with a little girl of her own, sitting on a stage and giving her mother the credit for how she loves her child.
Lisa Marie’s hugs didn’t stop with Riley. If Riley has her way, Tupelo is growing up in that same loving, hands-on family style, and we have a feeling her grandma would be thrilled about that.