The wait is over: the first excerpt from Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumous memoir From Here to the Great Unknown is finally here.
The excerpt is featured exclusively in this week’s PEOPLE cover story, and it sees Lisa Marie — whose daughter, actress Riley Keough, completed the memoir after her death at age 54 in 2023 — look back on her early life with her superstar dad Elvis Presley.
“Wherever possible, I wrote it exactly as she said it,” Riley writes in the memoir of transcribing tapes of memories her mom had left for her. “In other cases, I’ve edited my mother’s words for clarity or to get at what I know was the root of what she was trying to convey. What mattered most to me was feeling like the end result sounded like her, that I could instantly recognize her in the pages, and I can.”
For more on what it was like for Riley Keough to finish her mom’s memoir, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribe here.
The book, which comes out Oct. 8 from Random House, covers everything from Lisa Marie’s bond with Elvis (who died in 1977, when she was 9), her romantic relationships, the balm of motherhood, the devastating death of her son Benjamin, Riley’s brother, and the redemptive birth of her granddaughter Tupelo, Riley’s 2-year-old daughter with husband Ben Smith-Petersen.
“The tapes are an incredible portrait of the force of nature that she was,” Riley says of her mother in an exclusive email interview with PEOPLE. “Depending on the day and her mood, she can sound locked-in or distracted, vulnerable and open or annoyed and closed off, hopeful, angry, everything. You hear her in all her complications.”
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Here, read an excerpt of Lisa Marie’s own words in From Here to the Great Unknown.
Going to his shows was my favorite thing in the world.
I was so proud of him. He would take me by the hand and bring me out onstage, then get walked to wherever his place was on the stage, and I would be taken from him and brought to wherever I was going to be sitting in the audience. Usually with [Elvis’ father] Vernon.
The electricity of those shows. There’s nothing I’ve felt that’s been even close to that feeling, ever. Electrifying is such a generic word, but it really is what it felt like. I loved watching him perform. I had certain songs that I liked — “Hurt,” and “How Great Thou Art.” I would ask him to sing those songs for me and he would always say yes.
I did not, however, like having the limelight shone on me or being asked to stand up in front of everybody. In Vegas, during his residency, he introduced Vernon, then looked toward me and I remember thinking, Oh God oh God please don’t.
“Lisa, stand up!”
It’s not that I wasn’t proud or that I didn’t love him. I just liked the limelight on him, loved it on him. It was not something that came to me inherently. I absolutely abhorred it.
But in other less public ways, I loved basking in his fame with him.
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In Los Angeles I went to school at John Thomas Dye, up in the hills of Bel Air. I still sometimes drive by it just to remember the day my dad came to a parent-teacher conference. I knew he was coming, and I couldn’t wait. I could feel the teachers’ nervousness and excitement, too. My little student friends were so excited that I got even more excited — everybody was just running around crazy.
Then my dad showed up. He got out of the car and he had on a respectable outfit — black pants and some kind of blouse — but he was also wearing a big, majestic belt with buckles and jewels and chains, as well as sunglasses. He was smoking a cigar. I met him at the car, and I walked up the walkway with him, and I just remember that feeling of walking next to him, holding his hand.
Excerpted from FROM HERE TO THE GREAT UNKNOWN by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough. Published by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Riley Keough
From Here to the Great Unknown by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough comes out Oct. 8 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.
