Lisa Marie Presley's posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, is set to hit bookstores on October 8, and it's set to give a never before seen look at her life as the daughter of Elvis and Priscilla Presley. Yet already, heartbreaking details of her life are making headlines.
© GettyFor example, Lisa Marie feared losing her father long-before he passed away.
© Bettmann"I was always worried about my dad dying," Lisa Marie reveals in the memoir, which has been extracted in People. "Sometimes I'd see him and he was out of it. Sometimes I would find him passed out. I wrote a poem with the line, 'I hope my daddy doesn’t die.'"
© GettyElvis would die in 1977 aged 42 from drug-related complications, when his daughter was only nine years old. At the time, he and Priscilla had been divorced for four years. Fans and critics had long been concerned about the King of Rock and Roll's health as he struggled with drug use and weight fluctuations.
Lisa Marie would go on to state in the memoir that she could vividly remember going to see her father's shows. In fact, it was her "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," she says.
She describes the shows as having an "electricity" that compares to nothing else: "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."
© GettyLisa Marie's memoir was completed by her daughter, actress Riley Keough, who listened to tapes of her mother's memories. Riley said that the process of completing her late mother's memoir was certainly bittersweet.
As the sole trustee of her mother's estate, and owner of the family's home Graceland, Riley said of her intentions in finishing the project: "What she wanted to do in her memoir, and what I hope I’ve done in finishing it for her, is to go beneath the magazine headline idea of her and reveal the core of who she was."
"To turn her into a three-dimensional human being: the best mother, a wild child, a fierce friend, an underrated artist, frank, funny, traumatized, joyous, grieving, everything that she was throughout her remarkable life. I want to give voice to my mother in a way that eluded her while she was alive."
