Lisa Marie Presley didn’t get to finish her memoir, which compiled the highs and lows of a full life as Elvis Presley’s daughter. However, her daughter Riley Keough ensure it was completed and shared with the world.
Presley — who died at the age of 54 in January 2023 — got candid about her abortion, losing her virginity, trapped her husband and more in her posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown.
TooFab has compiled the 5 biggest takeaways from Presley’s memoir here.
In the posthumous memoir, Presley opened up about the first time she became pregnant with her then-boyfriend Danny Keough, who she ended up marrying.
“The first time I got pregnant I didn’t even know it,” Lisa Marie wrote in her memoir, per E! News. “During the first four months we dated I had ended up in the ER with horrible pains and they rushed me into surgery.” At the time, the singer said that doctors thought she had an issue with her appendix, however after the surgery she was told it was an ectopic pregnancy. An ectopic pregnancy occurs when a fertilized egg implants and grows outside the main cavity of the uterus, according to Mayo Clinic.
“I ended up having an abortion,” she wrote. “And it was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my whole life. I was devastated.”
She revealed that she “had never gotten pregnant with any other person,” despite being “equally sloppy” by not using birth control. The “Shine” singer recalled that following the procedure she and Danny “were both destroyed and not long after that we fell apart and broke up. I couldn’t live with myself.”
Presley also wrote about being “so upset with” herself that she “plotted” and “schemed” to get pregnant again.
“I pinpointed exactly when I was ovulating,” she wrote. When she went to visit Danny one night, she did not tell him she was hoping to conceive a child.
“I didn’t really care anymore what he thought about it,” she explained. “I didn’t care if he wanted to be a part of it or not. I felt that I had to redeem, to make amends, because I still couldn’t believe I had had an abortion. I thought, ‘I’m going to have this child. There is a child I need to be having.'”
“I would be talking to the lost child, saying, ‘I’m so sorry, I can’t believe I f–king did that. Please forgive me and stay with me until I get pregnant again,'” she wrote, per Page Six.
Two weeks after spending the night with Danny, she found out she was pregnant and the pair got married soon after.
“Danny knew he had to marry me,” she wrote. Presley was pregnant with her first born Riley, who was born in May 1989, at the time..
She added that she “trapped him” — writing, “I didn’t really mean to, but I did,” per Page Six.
Along with Riley, the couple welcomed son Benjamin Keough in October 1992, before their divorce in 1994. Their son died by suicide in 2020.
Riley, now 35, said in September that Lisa Marie died of a “broken heart” following the loss of her son.
The late Presley was also a mother to her twin daughters Harper and Finley Lockwood, now 16, whom she shared with her fourth husband, Michael Lockwood. She was also previously married to Michael Jackson from 1994 to 1996 and Nicolas Cage from 2002 to 2004.
If you or someone you know is struggling with depression or has had thoughts of harming themselves or taking their own life, get help. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (1-800-273-8255) provides 24/7, free, confidential support for people in distress.
Presley lost her virginity at 14-years-old to a 23-year-old man she did not name in the memoir.
She met him in the Bahamas and he had a “small role” in a film her mother, Priscilla Presley, was in.
“I fell hard,” she recalled, per Us Weekly.The man, who was nine years her senior, was “understandably, horribly apprehensive” about starting a relationship with Presley. However, she recalled being “madly in love” and her mother tried to stop the relationship, despite meeting Elvis Presley at 14 too.
“I was replaying her life in a weird way,” Presley recalled.
“But she and my dad waited until she was 18 to have sex. I was 14 when I lost my virginity to this guy,” she wrote. The pair dated for over two years, with Presley saying the relationship ended due to his friends “secretly” photographing them together.
“They sold the story, got paid for the photos. He didn’t care about me,” she wrote. “Ours was an illegal relationship and selling those photos outed him.”
When she found out about the “big betrayal”, she “swallowed 20 Valium,” however said she “wasn’t that serious” in her “suicide attempt” as she ensured “somebody” saw her do it. Later in the book, she did reveal that she later reconnected with the older man.
“By that point, I had met and fallen in love with a guy named Danny Keough,” she added.
While deciding on her son’s final resting place, Presley kept his body preserved in a coffin on dry ice for two months in their home.
Her grief was so all-consuming but she said she found solace in “caring for him and keeping him there. I think it would scare the living f–king piss out of anybody else to have their son there like that. But not me. I felt so fortunate that there was a way that I could still parent him, delay it a bit longer so that I could become okay with laying him to rest,” per Yahoo Entertainment.
She also invited a tattoo artist to see Benjamin so she could could get a replica of his tattoos in order to get some matching ink for herself. In a new interview with Oprah Winfrey Riley shared that she too honored Benjamin by getting tats that matched his.
As he had his sister’s name written on his collarbone and his mom’s on his hand, as a tribute, both women got Benjamin’s name inscribed on the exact areas — which meant the tattoo artist had to inspect his preserved body in order to get the “placement exactly right.”
“He’s like, OK, do you have any photos?” Riley recalled the tattoo artist asking. “And she was like ‘No, but I can show you.'”
Keough insisted her mom wasn’t “crazy” for letting the tattoo artist inspect her late brother’s body, adding that the moment was very “matter of fact.”
The Daisy Jones & the Six star said the tattoo artist was luckily “very normal about the whole thing” and acted professionally despite the strange request.
It did, however, make Keough a little uncomfortable, with the film and TV actress telling Winfrey she “stayed quiet” in that moment out of respect for her mom.
“But it was definitely one of the most absurd moments [of my life],” Keough admitted.
Benjamin was ultimately laid to rest at Graceland, next to his grandfather, following a funeral in Malibu.
Presley was later buried there as well following her death.
At 40-years-old, Presley suffered from a battle with addition after the C-section birth of her twins in 2008.
Keough recalled to Winfrey her mother telling her she had “been taking opiates.”
“‘And at first, I was taking them for pain. Then I was taking them to sleep at night. Now it’s like I’m taking them for fun,'” Riley recalled to Winfrey.
In her memoir, Presley recalled “upping the pills” after she left the church of Scientology, per TODAY.
“I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’ve lost my religion and it’s been my only pavement to walk on, my replacement family.’ Everything was gone — all my friends, everything,” she wrote, per TODAY. “I knew it was over. And I was so devastated, I used the drugs as a coping mechanism.”
Keough also noted that her mother was “drinking more.”
“At one point she found an article that said cocaine can help people get off opioids, so she began to do cocaine to get off the opioids and then opioids to get off the cocaine. Her addiction would continue through all of the stints in rehab on the basis that she was always in severe and life-threatening withdrawals that no doctor could understand,” Keough wrote, per TODAY.
Presley admitted to taking 80 painkillers a day when she was at her rock bottom and heading in and out of rehab.
Throughout this time in 2016, Presley was caught up in a messy divorce from her husband Lockwood where her assets were frozen and she was in a lengthy custody battle over the twins.
Due to her battle with addiction, the court required her to have a court-certified monitor to see the twins, which ended up being Riley. The twins, Presley, her brother and father all moved in with Riley to help.
“It seemed like it could have been good to have everyone together. But it felt like the end of things,” Riley wrote, per TODAY. “We’d had this amazing, colorful, beautiful, abundant, fun, joyful life — but in that house, it took a turn and got unbearably dark for all of us.”
Riley she was proud of Presley for not relapsing after the death of her son.
If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, get help. The Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) National Helpline (1-800-662-4357) provides 24/7, free, confidential support for people in distress.
From Here to the Great Unknown is out now.
