Lisa Marie Presley ‘always worried’ about her dad, Elvis, dying. What she shared in her memoir

Lisa Marie Presley is posthumously releasing her memoir after her daughter Riley Keough finished writing it for her in the wake of her death in 2023. Lisa Marie Presley, the daughter of Elvis and Priscilla Presley, died at 54 following a small bowel obstruction, a complication of bariatric surgery.

Before her death, Lisa Marie Presley asked her daughter to help her finish writing a memoir, according to the publisher, Penguin Random House. Even though her mother died a month later, Riley Keough said in a new email interview with People that she decided to finish the project — using hours of tapes of her mother talking about her life to help do so. Riley Keough told the outlet that she hoped the finished book would “go beneath the magazine headline idea of (Lisa Marie Presley) and reveal the core of who she was.”

“To turn her into a three-dimensional human being: the best mother, a wild child, a fierce friend, an underrated artist, frank, funny, traumatized, joyous, grieving, everything that she was throughout her remarkable life,” Riley Keough wrote. “I want to give voice to my mother in a way that eluded her while she was alive.”In the memoir’s introduction published by People, Riley Keough said that she “wrote it exactly as (Lisa Marie Presley) said it” whenever possible. In a memoir excerpt provided to People and written from Lisa Marie Presley’s perspective, the late daughter of the King of Rock and Roll said attending her dad’s shows was her “favorite thing in the world.”

“I had certain songs that I liked — ‘Hurt’ and ‘How Great Thou Art.’ I would ask him to sing those songs for me and he would always say yes,” Lisa Marie Presley said in the excerpt. Despite enjoying the spotlight that so often landed on her famous father, Lisa Marie Presley also wrote about the darker side of fame. “I was always worried about my dad dying,” she said in the memoir. “Sometimes I’d see him and he was out of it. Sometimes I would find him passed out. I wrote a poem with the line, ‘I hope my daddy doesn’t die.’”

People reports the memoir will address much of Lisa Marie Presley’s life, including how her father died in 1977, when she was just 9 years old. Lisa Marie Presley abused drugs as a teen before marrying Danny Keough in 1988 and welcoming Riley Keough. The two would go on to divorce in 1994, and less than one month later, she married Michael Jackson. The two split up in 1996 and in 2002, Lisa Marie Presley married actor Nicolas Cage and split a few months later. In 2006, she and musician Michael Lockwood wed. They divorced in 2016.

The memoir will also address Lisa Marie Presley’s struggle with addiction to painkillers and the death of her son, Ben Keough. He died by suicide in 2020 after his own battles with addiction. “My mom tried her best to find strength for me and my younger sisters after Ben died, but we knew how much pain she was in,” Riley Keough told People. “My mom physically died from the aftereffects of her surgery, but we all knew she died of a broken heart.”

In addition to her daughter Riley Keough, Lisa Marie Presley is survived by her two younger children, twins daughters Harper and Finley, whom she shared with Lockwood. The twins will turn 16 in October 2024.