It was a year ago this week when Elvis Presley’s only child died suddenly at just 54.
Lisa Marie Presley lived a complicated life in the celebrity spotlight from losing her father The King at just nine to her four failed marriages, which included being wed to Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage.
The singer-songwriter, who released her own studio albums, also suffered the tragic loss of her son, the only grandson of Elvis, at just 27 in 2020.
Four days before she died, Lisa Marie gave a speech outside Graceland on her father’s birthday, before witnessing Austin Butler win a Golden Globe for playing Elvis in Baz Luhrmann’s biopic.
Now her eldest daughter and Graceland heiress Riley Keough has announced that her mother’s posthumous memoir is set for release later this year.
Elvis’ granddaughter wrote on Instagram: “I’m honored to help put my mother’s book out for her. Her autobiography will be out in October with @randomhouse and you can pre order it now.”
The official synopsis for the untitled book reads: “Born to an American myth and raised in the wilds of Graceland, Lisa Marie Presley was never truly understood . . . until now. Before her death in 2023, she’d been working on a raw, riveting, one-of-a-kind memoir for years, recording countless hours of breathtakingly vulnerable tape, which has finally been put on the page by her daughter, Riley Keough.”
Publisher Random House shared that before her death, Lisa Marie had asked Riley to help her finish her memoir. It turns out her daughter had since “carried a guilt” that it was not finished before she died, fearing the world “would never know the loving, joyful, and caring woman that she knew and grieved.”
Elvis’ granddaughter ended up listening to hours of her mother’s tape recordings for the book. The publisher said: “She listened as Lisa Marie told story after story about the unconditional love she felt from her father, about being upstairs at Graceland, just the two of them, a sanctuary from the chaos of her life.”
Riley, who will help finish her mother’s memoir from her own memory and those closest to her 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. I’m so excited to share my mom now, at her most vulnerable and most honest, and in doing so, I do hope that readers come to love my mom as much as I did.”
To pre-order Lisa Marie’s memoir, which Random House calls “the most intimate look at the Presley family to date”, click here.