Lisa Marie Presley opens up about death of her dad Elvis in posthumous new memoir

9 October 2024, 09:56

The Presley family has been struck by several tragedies.

When Lisa Marie Presley died last year aged just 54, it was the most recent of several tragedies suffered by the Presley family over the years.

Lisa Marie's son Benjamin Keough died by suicide in 2020 when he was 27, and of course her father Elvis Presley died in 1977 when he was only 42.

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Lisa Marie's posthumous memoir From Here to the Great Unknown has been completed by her daughter Riley Keough, who used her late mother's audio tapes to help her finish off the project.

The book was released this month and in it, Lisa opens up about the aftermath of her father Elvis's death when she was nine, and its effect on her.

She revealed that during the two days that Elvis's body was displayed in an open casket in Graceland, she would "touch his face and hold his hand, to talk to him".

Lisa Marie added: "There have been nights as an adult when I would just get drunk and listen to his music and sit there and cry. The grief still comes. It's still just there."

Riley Keough told BBC News: "It made me emotional that she was sharing it with the world because it was a story that she felt very protective of."

In her book, Lisa Marie also shared her deep trauma and grief about the loss of her son Benjamin.

"I think that it's pretty common in the way that we handle death in the Western world to [keep it] very quick and there's not really a grieving process," Riley said.

"The body is taken away and the doors are shut and you don't see anything. It's not the way that it's done so much in other places."

In an earlier statement about From Here to the Great Unknown, Keough said: "Few people had the opportunity to know who my mom really was, other than being Elvis's daughter.

"I was lucky to have had that opportunity and working on preparing her autobiography for publication has been a privilege, albeit a bittersweet one."