Riley Keough felt compelled to finish Lisa Marie Presley's book about Elvis, grief, addiction and love

Riley Keough quickly agreed to help complete her mother's memoir. She thought they would write it together, reflecting on their extraordinary upbringings and lives, but after the sudden death of Lisa Marie Presley in 2023, the responsibility became much greater.

The task that her mother – the only child of Elvis and Priscilla Presley and a recording artist herself – had begun years earlier triggered “all sorts of emotions,” Keough said in an interview with The Associated Press before the release of the Book on Tuesday.

“It just felt like some kind of duty that I had to do for her,” Keough said. “I’m just glad it’s done and that it’s out in the world and there for people to read.”

The name “From Here to the Great Unknown” is a reference to the moving lyrics of Presley's “Where No One Stands Alone,” a song that Lisa Marie sang over 50 years after its first release and over 40 years later as a duet with her father recorded after his death.

The book touches on themes such as “love and loss and grief and mothers and daughters and addiction,” Keough said, adding that it was designed as a way for Lisa Marie to tell her story in her own words and connect with others.

In fact, much of the book is contained in the words of Lisa Marie, as Keough faithfully listened to recordings of her mother recounting memories and experiences large and small. Lisa Marie wrote openly about the day her father died, her relationship with her mother, her marriage to Michael Jackson, her addiction issues and the death of her son Benjamin in 2020, and many other parts of her life.

Although Lisa Marie's life has been the subject of tabloid press since days after her birth, her memoir details intimate moments in Graceland, including how she feared for Presley's health as a young girl. In the chapter titled “He's Gone,” she wrote that as a child she often worried about her father's death and even wrote a poem with the line “I hope my father doesn't die.”

She also wrote that on the day of Presley's death in 1977, Graceland became a “Friday for everyone” and residents of the house took jewelry and personal items “before he was even declared dead.”

Lisa Marie's candid writing style extends to the section focusing on her headline-grabbing marriage to Jackson from 1994 to 1996. She wrote that Jackson had confessed his love for her while she was still married to Keough and that he wanted to have children with her. As his dependence on prescription drugs increased, their relationship fell apart.

Keough said it was sometimes “heartbreaking” to hear her mother's voice in the recordings, but she enjoyed hearing fond memories, such as how her parents met and fell in love. Keough is one of two children Lisa Marie had with her first husband, musician Danny Keough, and her late son Benjamin.

“It makes me want to tell everyone to talk to their parents and record them telling them all the stories about how they met and all that stuff because it's just really cool to do that have,” she said.

Keough's role was to fill in parts of Lisa Marie's story that she had been unable to progress on before her death in January 2023 due to a small intestinal obstruction caused by bariatric surgery performed years earlier. These gaps also included lighter moments and happy memories from her mother's adult life.

“Until my mother's addiction, when I was 25, I think we would all say we had a really beautiful, extraordinarily happy and wonderful life,” Keough said. “I wouldn't call our life together a tragedy. I think there’s so much more.”

And while those funnier, more lighthearted moments, like Lisa Marie whizzing around Graceland in her golf cart and Keough coming home from school to spend time with her mother, are detailed throughout the book, Keough said Lisa Marie wanted to talk about grief and write about the loss of her son.

Writing about her experiences grieving her brother and describing his death by suicide “didn't come naturally” to Keough, but she said she knew her mother wouldn't have shied away from it. Lisa Marie wrote that she wanted to honor her son by sparking open conversations about suicide, addiction and mental health.

“How can I heal?” Lisa Marie writes in the book. “By helping people.”

For Keough, much of her life now revolves around learning to live with grief and dealing with the tremendous losses she has suffered.

“My last four years have been nothing but sadness, so much sadness. But it's just something I run around with. You just have a broken heart, and that's just how it is, and you just learn to live with those holes and the sadness and the pain and the love and the longing and the missing and the confusion and all of that,” Keough said. “It's very complicated. I think you just have to try to let it be there.”

As the daughter of the King of Rock & Roll, much of Lisa Marie's life was made up of unique experiences, but Keough said her mother wanted to “connect with people on a human level” in her memoir.

“Her goal was to tell her story so people could relate and feel less alone in the world. That’s why I think we tell stories,” Keough said. “So that’s my goal.”