The Biggest Bombshells From Lisa Marie Presley's Memoir

It's always been a family affair with the Presleys, and Lisa Marie Presley's memoir is no exception. Titled "From Here to the Great Unknown," the book has been posthumously published with the help of her daughter, Riley Keough, who co-authored the work. Lisa Marie died in January 2023 of cardiac arrest, but before her death, she asked Riley to help her finish what she started. The final work alternates between Lisa Marie's writing on her life and Riley giving her own context and thoughts as a first-hand observer who grew up amidst the flashing lights and celebrity gossip.

In a 2024 special on CBS Mornings, Riley talked to Oprah Winfrey about their personal journey with the book, explaining that her mother "didn't like talking about herself particularly." She added, "She was incredibly insecure, and I think there were moments where she kind of was going, 'Why am I even writing a book about myself?'" In the memoir, Lisa Marie gives some insight into her own reasons for spilling so much ink over her wonderful and troubled life, saying she wanted "to help other people somehow." The book does all of that and more as the mother-daughter duo give audiences a glimpse into the life of one of America's most famous families.

It would be many years until Lisa Marie Presley married Michael Jackson, but the two famous children crossed paths when she was just 6 years old. In her memoir, she notes that the King of Pop came to one of her father's Las Vegas shows when she was only a kid. By doing some math on their birthdays, that would mean that Jackson was around 16 years old at the time. Later, Jackson invited Priscilla Presley out to dinner, which Lisa Marie later claimed was all in hopes that she would be joining her mom.

The two later became romantically involved in 1994, when Lisa Marie was fresh off a divorce from her first husband, Danny Keough (with whom she has two children, including Riley Keough). She and Jackson met up in Las Vegas and spent eight days together. Lisa Marie talks about them staying up all night chatting, and by the end of their extended stay in Vegas, she writes that Michael confessed his love for her. "'I don't know if you've noticed, but I'm completely gone in love with you,'" she wrote. "By then, I felt I was in love with him too." 

Lisa Marie also writes that at the time, Jackson was 35 years old and claimed to still be a virgin, though "physical stuff started happening" between them. The two got married in May 1994 and then divorced in 1996, with Lisa Marie's tragic past returning as she saw similar "behaviors" in Jackson as she had in her father — including the hiring of a private doctor to administer pain medication.

Lisa Marie Presley kept her deceased son, Benjamin Keough, on a bed of dry ice for two months to properly grieve him. Her son died by suicide in 2020 at the age of 27. Riley Keough was there throughout the whole process and wrote about sitting with her mother beside Benjamin's body. Lisa Marie had mourned her father, Elvis, the same way. "I told [the funeral home owner] that having my dad in the house after he died was incredibly helpful because I could go and spend time with him and talk to him," she wrote in her memoir. She said, 'We'll bring Ben Ben [her nickname for her son] to you. You can have him there.'" Lisa Marie was 9 years old when her father died, and Riley was 31 when her brother passed.

Noting that there was no law in California that mandated that someone be buried immediately, Lisa Marie nonetheless seemed aware of her unorthodox grieving methods. "I think it would scare the living f****** p*** out of anybody else to have their son there like that," she wrote. "But not me." Lisa Marie and Riley commemorated Benjamin's life by getting tattoos to match the ones he had on his hand and collarbone. This required inviting a tattoo artist into their home to sit with them next to Benjamin's body on ice and replicate the inking. "Lisa Marie Presley had just asked this poor man to look at the body of her dead son, which happened to be right next to us in the casitas," Riley wrote. "I've had an extremely absurd life, but this moment is in the top five."

In her memoir, Lisa Marie Presley recounted how she was sexually abused by her mother's boyfriend, Michael Edwards, when she was a young girl. "The first time Edwards came into my room in the middle of the night, drunk, kneeling, was years before," she wrote in "From Here to the Great Unknown." "I think I was 10. I woke up to find him on his knees next to my bed, running his finger up my leg under the sheets." According to Lisa Marie, Edwards claimed he was "going to teach [her] what was going to happen when [she] got older."

When Lisa Marie told her mother about the incident, Priscilla Presley apparently flew into the house, slammed the door, and then called her daughter to her room and made Edwards apologize to her. Despite the concession, the abuse continued when she was 11, 12, and 13 years old. "He'd still come into my room now and then, but I would move or do something to make him think that I was waking up, then he'd run down the hallway back to my mom's room, freak out, and stay away." Edwards also published a memoir in 1988, titled "Priscilla, Elvis and Me", in which he recalled "craving Lisa sexually." He is now 80 years old and said in a comment to Page Six about the matter, "I was encouraged to embellish a harmless anecdote about Lisa Marie in my memoir from the 1980s and now regret that I did. I understand that these stories sell books, but the notion that I molested Lisa Marie is just a fabrication."

Hollywood star and known Church of Scientology advocate, John Travolta, first approached Lisa Marie Presley's mother about joining the oft-debated religion. Priscilla Presley invited Travolta to Lisa Marie's 10th birthday party, and it was there that he planted a seed of interest. A few days later, Priscilla joined the church, and in her memoir, Lisa Marie said that her mother told her that Scientology "can make you really powerful." Soon, Lisa Marie was being dropped off at the Hollywood Scientology building right after school, where she says the people there became her "tribe," and she felt a sense of community for the first time. 

Lisa Marie's relationship with Scientology would prove to be both helpful and harmful. During her own period of drug addiction, she talks about how the Scientology Celebrity Centre helped her get better by making her take care of an unnamed young girl who was in worse condition than she was. "They made me take care of somebody who came in legitimately addicted to drugs, she wrote. "I became really close with that girl... I really thrived taking care of her, helping somebody else." But after leaving Scientology in 2013, she has also spoken out against the religion, telling USA Weekend, "Uncovering the fact that I was surrounded by people who were not well-intended ... Basically, it was a big sinister situation, where there was like, kind of intel and covert ops going on, and a whole effort to control me that I didn't know about."

Speaking to Oprah Winfrey at CBS Mornings , Riley Keough said that when her mother was 9 years old, she woke up with an instinctive bad feeling on the day that her father, Elvis, died. Riley said that their new memoir is one of the first times her mother really opened up about the passing of her father. "[Lisa Marie] said goodnight to him, and I think she knew saying 'goodnight' ... she had a sense many times that he wasn't okay," Riley told Oprah.

Riley also said that her family saved letters that Lisa Marie wrote as a child. In them, she would write about hoping that her father wouldn't die. In "From Here to the Great Unknown," Riley recalled that her mother "would tell me sometimes she would find him in his bathroom looking kind of out of it or holding onto the railing to stand up straight." 

Riley seemingly re-lived a familiar foreboding sense of worry in the final days leading up to Lisa Marie's death. As reported by Yahoo News , Keough told Winfrey, "The last three weeks that she was alive, I was with her a few times [and] I felt worried," she told Winfrey. "I think there was always sort of an undertone for me because of this feeling that I was on borrowed time with her. But there were a couple interactions with her that she just felt detached in a way, a kind of a resignation." Fittingly, Lisa Marie was buried at her family's estate in Graceland  — the place where she grew up and where she would often go back and visit  — next to her son Benjamin, father Elvis, and members of the extended Presley family.

If you or someone you know may be the victim of child abuse, please contact the Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline at 1-800-4-A-Child (1-800-422-4453) or contact their live chat services.

If you or anyone you know needs help with addiction issues, help is available. Visit the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration website or contact SAMHSA's National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357).