Lisa Marie Presley’s memoir, written together with her daughter Riley Keough, will be released later this year.
- READ MORE: Sofia Coppola on baring Elvis’ ugly side in ‘Priscilla’: “I never wanted him to be a villain”
The singer-songwriter and daughter of Elvis Presley will posthumously release the book via Pan Macmillan on October 15. The memoir’s title has yet to be announced. Lisa Marie Presley, who passed away exactly a year ago on January 12, 2023, had asked her daughter, Riley Keough, to help her complete the work before she passed. Presley left behind tapes onto which she recorded parts of the autobiography.
According to The Bookseller, Pan Macmillan conveyed in a statement that the memoir will comprehensively cover Presley’s life, from her years growing up in the Graceland estate, to her relationship with her father, and her relationships with Michael Jackson and Nicholas Cage.
“[Keough] 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,” read the statement. “About growing up with the clicking cameras perpetually at the door. About her own wild love stories, and her marriages to Michael Jackson and Nicolas Cage. About motherhood and the shattering loss of her son, Riley’s brother Benjamin Keough, to suicide.”
Keough also expressed her sentiments working on the project, stating: “Few people had the opportunity to know who my mom really was, other than being Elvis’ 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.”
The print edition of the yet-untitled memoir will be accompanied by the release of an audiobook version, which will be read by Keough and incorporate segments of Lisa Marie’s voice recordings.
Lisa Marie Presley died at the age of 54 after an emergency admission to the hospital. While her death was initially thought to be caused by cardiac arrest, the Los Angeles County Medical Examiner-Coroner’s Office later confirmed that Presley died from a “sequelae of a small bowel obstruction”, or an intestinal obstruction that constricted blood supply to her digestive tract.
Presley was born in 1968 as the only child to her parents Elvis and Priscilla, and was the sole heir to the Graceland estate, which she inherited in 1980. She went on to pursue her own music career, within which she released three studio albums, namely ‘To Whom It May Concern’ in 2003, ‘Now What’ in 2004, and ‘Storm And Grace’ in 2012. The former two albums peaked in the Top 10 of the Billboard 200 album charts.
In November, Variety uncovered emails revealing that Presley had attempted to convince director Sofia Coppola to revise the script of her latest film, Priscilla. Presley found the biopic, which stars Cailee Spaeney as the titular wife to Jacob Elordi’s Elvis, to portray her father as “a predator and manipulative”, adding that the script was “shockingly vengeful and contemptuous”, before begging the director to avoid further straining her relationship with her mother.
Earlier in January, Coppola spoke in an interview with NME about her approach to telling Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s story, stating that while she did not want to put Elvis on a pedestal, she did not mean to make him a villain either: “It definitely is looking at this mythic couple and showing his human side and I tried to approach it with sensitivity and not be judgmental. I never wanted him to be a villain.”