Riley Keough Says She Took on Mom Lisa Marie Presley’s ‘Southern Style of Parenting’ with Her 2-Year-Old Daughter Tupelo
"It's actually very specifically my family," the actress tells PEOPLE of her parenting style
Riley Keough is sharing how Lisa Marie Presley influenced her role as a parent.
During the Los Angeles stop on her tour for the release of her late mom’s memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, the actress, 35, sat down with author Taylor Jenkins Reid and shared how she mirrors some of Presley’s parenting as a mom to daughter Tupelo, 2.
“I think that I always say it’s this southern style of parenting, but it’s actually very specifically my family,” Keough began. “I think it is from the south, but whatever way she was parented was how I was parented in a sense. And I also now sort of parent that way.”
She continued, “It’s really loving and tactile and smothering — no boundaries.”
As for why she described her family’s unique parenting style in so much detail in the book, Keough said, “I thought putting in the way that my family in the south spoke to each other in this totally insane way, kind of could help paint the picture of absolutely the wildness.”
In an exclusive excerpt of the late star’s posthumous memoir, which was featured in a September PEOPLE cover story, Keough revealed the adorable nickname Presley had for her 2-year-old granddaughter.
She “would call Tupelo our little light,” the proud mom wrote.
The news of Tupelo’s birth was first revealed during Lisa Marie’s memorial service at Graceland in Memphis, Tenn., in January 2023, shortly after she died at age 54 from a small-bowel obstruction that developed following her bariatric surgery several years prior.
Keough had her husband, stuntman Ben Smith-Petersen, read the tribute she had written to her mom on stage, in which she said, “I hope I can love my daughter the way you loved me, the way you loved my brother and my sisters.” A rep for Riley later confirmed that the Daisy Jones & the Six actress and her husband had indeed welcomed their daughter in 2022.
Tupelo is named after the Mississippi city Elvis was born in, and she shares the same middle name, Storm, as Riley’s late brother Benjamin, who died by suicide at age 27 in 2020.
