Lisa Marie Presley Shares Emotional Details from Day Dad Elvis Died in New Memoir: 'I Was Screaming Bloody Murder'

Lisa Marie Presley’s posthumous memoir gives new insight into the day her father, Elvis Presley, died at Graceland.

IN From here to the Great Unknown, Lisa Marie looks back on August 16, 1977, the day she lost her legendary father.

“I ran to him, but someone grabbed me, pulled me back. They were trying to work on him,” she writes in the book. “I screamed bloody murder. I knew it wasn’t good.”

Later, Lisa Marie, who was only 9 at the time, could hear her paternal grandfather “wail, wail,” she writes. “That noise. I’ll never get over that sound of him wailing. I could hear, ‘Oh, he’s gone. He’s gone.’ ”

That was the day the music stopped — and “my life as I knew it was completely over,” writes Lisa Marie of her father’s death from drug-related complications at age 42.

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Elvis, Priscilla and Lisa Marie Presley in February 1968.

Michael Ochs/Getty Archive

More than 45 years later, in January 2023, Lisa Marie died of a small bowel obstruction, a long-term complication of bariatric surgery she had undergone several years earlier; she was 54 years old.

A month before her death, Lisa Marie’s daughter, actress Riley Keough, told her mom that she would help her finish her memoir. Now she has fulfilled that promise, finishing the book after listening to the memory tapes her mother left behind.

“Because my mother was the daughter of Elvis Presley, she was constantly talked about, argued about and dissected,” Riley, 35, told PEOPLE in an exclusive email interview for last week’s cover story. “What she wanted to do in her memoir, and what I hope I’ve managed to accomplish for her, is to go beneath the magazine title’s idea of ​​her and uncover the core of who she was, turn her into a three-dimensional human being: the best mother, wild child, fierce friend, an underrated artist, honest, funny, traumatized, joyful, grieving, everything she was during her remarkable life, I want to give voice to my mother in a way that eluded her while she was alive.

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Riley Keough and Lisa Marie Presley at the launch party for “Commando: The Autobiography of Johnny Ramone” in April 2012 in West Hollywood.

John Sciulli/WireImage

Elsewhere in the book, Lisa Marie writes that she is worried about her father’s mortality.

“I was always worried my dad was going to die,” writes Lisa Marie. “Sometimes I’d see him and he’d be out of his mind. Sometimes I’d find him passed out. I wrote a song with the line ‘I hope my dad doesn’t die.’ ”

In a new interview with Oprah Winfrey airing Tuesday, October 8 on CBS, Riley talks about her mother’s struggle to come to terms with Elvis’ death.

“Her grief was very … I don’t think she could process it,” Riley said. “It was a very private thing for her. She would listen to his music alone, if she was drunk, and cry… I would go into her room and she had speakers – because that was the way it used to be – and she would sit on the floor and cry, and she would listen to her dad’s music.”

From here to the Great Unknown it’s out now.

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Source: HIS Education