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)."

"I had never gotten pregnant with any other person, which is fascinating because I'd been equally sloppy, not using birth control or whatever. But with Danny it happened that first time, and then it happened again when we got back together," Presley wrote.

The second time she became pregnant, Presley recalled not knowing what to do. Danny, too, was unsure.

"I ended up having an abortion," Presley wrote. "And it was the stupidest thing I've ever done in my whole life. I was devastated. I did it and we both cried. We were both destroyed and not long after that we fell apart and broke up. I couldn't live with myself."

The decision, Presley writes, haunted her so much that she "planned and plotted and schemed" to figure out when she was ovulating and proceeded to follow Danny onto a cruise ship where his band was performing. "I didn't care if he wanted to be a part of it or not. I felt that I had to redeem, to make amends, because I still couldn't believe I had had an abortion," Presley wrote. "I thought, I'm going to have this child. There is a child I need to be having."