Riley Keough on Her Mother, Lisa Marie Presley: ‘She Was Heartbroken My Whole Life’

This week, Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, hit shelves. After her death in 2022, the book was finished by Presley’s daughter, Riley Keough, and has since received acclaim (and a lot of attention) for its excruciating recollections about growing up as Elvis Presley’s only child, insightful observations about intergenerational trauma, and yes, some truly brow-raising revelations about other industry greats.

“She was heartbroken my whole life,” Keough remembers of her mother in From Here to the Great Unknown. The heartbreak, she wrote, began after Presley’s father died and was sustained by a series of devastations throughout her short life—from her son Benjamin Storm’s suicide, to, as Presley recalls in the book, an abortion she referred to as “the stupidest thing” she’d ever done.

Prior to giving birth to Riley, Presley became pregnant twice before during her relationship with Riley’s father, Danny Keough. The first pregnancy landed her in the ER, where she eventually learned she’d had an ectopic pregnancy. When she became pregnant a second time, she chose to have an abortion.

“The first time I got pregnant I didn’t even know it. During the first four months we dated I had ended up in the ER with horrible pains and they rushed me into surgery,” Presley wrote of the harrowing experience. “The doctors thought it was my appendix, but when I came around, they told me I’d had an ectopic pregnancy (while they were in there they took my appendix out, too).”