Lisa Marie Presley describes emotional details from the day her father Elvis Presley died in her posthumous memoir.
Before Lisa Marie died at the age of 54 in January 2023, she asked daughter Riley Keough to complete her long-gestating book.
Using tapes the singer-songwriter recorded, From Here to the Great Unknown was released this week, with one chapter seeing her recall music icon Elvis’s death at the age of 42 in August 1977.
“I ran to him, but somebody grabbed me, pulled me back. They were trying to work on him,” she writes. “I was screaming bloody murder. I knew it was not good.”
Lisa Marie also recounted how she could hear her paternal grandfather “wailing”.
“That noise. I’ll never get past that sound of him wailing. I could hear, ‘Oh he’s gone. He’s gone,'” the singer continues, noting that she realised “my life as I knew it (was) completely over”.
Elsewhere in the memoir, Lisa Marie opened up about how she was often concerned about Elvis’s health growing up.
“I was always worried about my dad dying,” she shares. “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.'”
Meanwhile, in a recent interview with Oprah Winfrey to promote the memoir, Riley discussed Lisa Marie’s life-long grief over Elvis’s tragic passing.
“Her grief was very… I don’t think she knew how to process it,” she mused. “It was a very private thing for her. She would listen to his music alone, if she was drunk, and cry… I would walk in her room and she had speakers – because this was back in the day – and she would be sitting on the floor crying and she’d listen to her dad’s music.”
From Here to the Great Unknown is now available to purchase.
