Riley Keough found it 'painful' listening back to Lisa Marie Presley's recordings
Riley Keough found it "incredibly painful" listening to Lisa Marie Presley's recordings so she could finish her memoir.
Riley Keough found it "incredibly painful" listening to her late mother's recordings to finish her memoir.
Lisa Marie Presley had been working on 'From Here To The Unknown' when she died in January 2023 and the 'Daisy Jones and the Six' star wanted to finish the book she was writing, but was initially "afraid" to listen to the recordings the singer had made of her memories from over the years.
In an extract from the book's introduction published by People magazine, she wrote: "Days and weeks and months of grief drifted by. Then I got the tapes of the memoir interviews she’d done. I was in my house, sitting on the couch. My daughter was sleeping.
"I was so afraid to hear my mother’s voice — the physical connection we have to the voices of our loved ones is profound. I decided to lie in my bed because I know how heavy grief makes my body feel.
"I began listening to her speak.
"It was incredibly painful but I couldn’t stop. It was like she was in the room, talking to me. I instantly felt like a child again and I burst into tears.
"My mommy. The tone of her voice."
Although Lisa Marie had covered growing up with her parents, the late Elvis Presley and his former wife Priscilla, and her marriages to Riley's dad, Danny Keough, and Michael Jackson, some parts the 35-year-old actress had to write herself.
Riley explained: "The early parts of the book are mostly her voice — in the tapes she speaks at length about her Graceland childhood, the death of her father, the dreadful aftermath, her relationship with her mother, her difficult teen years. She’s frank and funny about my father, Danny Keough. She talks openly about her relationship with Michael Jackson. She’s painfully candid about her later drug addiction and about the perils of fame.
"There are times, too, where it sounds like she wants to burn the world to the ground; other times, she displays compassion and empathy — all facets of the woman who was my mother, each of those strands, beautiful and broken, forged together in early trauma, crashing together at the end of her life...
"But there are things she doesn’t talk about in the tapes, things she didn’t get to, especially in the later part of her life. We saw each other five times a week throughout my life, and we lived together full-time until I was 25. Where there are gaps in her story, I fill them in."
