Author: Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough
Genre: Memoir
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group, 2024
Pages: 304
Rating: Recommend
A month later, Lisa Marie was dead, and the world would never know her story in her own words, never know the passionate, joyful, caring, and complicated woman that Riley loved and now grieved.
Riley got tapes that her mother had recorded for the book, lay in her bed, and listened as Lisa Marie told her story after story about smashing golf carts together in the yards of Graceland, about the unconditional love she felt from her father, about being upstairs, just the two of them. About getting dragged screaming out of the bathroom as she ran toward his body on the floor. About living in Los Angeles with her mother, getting sent to school after school, always kicked out, always in trouble. About her singular, lifelong
relationship with Danny Keough, about being married to Michael Jackson, what they had in common. About motherhood. About deep addiction. About ever-present grief. Riley knew she had to fulfill her mother's wish to reveal these memories, incandescent, and painful, to the world.
To make her mother known.
Review: I found out to late that the audio version of this book contains Lisa Marie's actual audio recordings, and that would have been great. However, I still liked this book.
I became an Elvis fan when my husband and I visited Graceland a few years ago. I agreed to go on the tour on a lark, but it was quite interesting. We also visited Sun Records where Elvis had recorded much of his music.
While Lisa Marie blames her dad's death for a lot of her issues later in life, I would argue that even if he had lived, she would have still been a wild child and who knows how that would have played out in her adult life. Neither parent set boundaries or expectations.
I sincerely wish things had gone differently for Lisa Marie, and her son Ben. So much tragedy.
