Riley Keough felt a duty to finish Lisa Marie Presley’s book on Elvis, grief, addiction and love

Riley Keough was quick to agree to help complete her mother’s memoir. She thought they’d write it together, reflecting on her extraordinary upbringing and life, but it became a much greater responsibility after Lisa Marie Presley’ssudden death in 2023.

Finishing the task her mother — the only child of Elvis and Priscilla Presley and a recording artist in her own right — had started years earlier elicited “all kinds of emotions,” Keough said in an interview with The Associated Press ahead of the book’s release Tuesday.

“It just felt like a kind of a duty that I had to complete for her,” Keough said. “I’m just happy that it’s done and that it’ll be in the world and there for people to read.”

“From Here to the Great Unknown” is named in a nod to the moving lyrics of Presley’s “Where No One Stands Alone,” a song Lisa Marie recorded as a duet with her father over 50 years after he first released it and over 40 years after his death.

The book, which is Oprah Winfrey's latest book club selection, touches on themes of “love and loss and grief and mothers and daughters and addiction,” Keough said, adding it was conceived as a way for Lisa Marie to tell her story in her own words and connect with others.

Much of the book is indeed in Lisa Marie’s words, as Keough faithfully listened to recordings of her mother recounting memories and experiences both big and small. Lisa Marie wrote openly about the day her father died, her relationship with her mother, her marriage to Michael Jackson, her struggles with addiction and her son Benjamin’s death in 2020, among many other parts of her life.

Although Lisa Marie's life had been tabloid fodder since days after her birth, her memoir details intimate moments at Graceland, including how she feared for Presley's health as a young girl. In the chapter titled “He's Gone,” she wrote that as a child, she often worried about her father dying and even wrote a poem with the line “I hope my daddy doesn't die.”

She also wrote that Graceland became a “free-for-all” the day of Presley's death in 1977, with those at the house taking jewelry and personal items “before he was even pronounced dead.”

Lisa Marie's frank writing extends into the section focused on her headline-making marriage to Jackson from 1994 to 1996. She wrote that Jackson confessed his love for her while she was still married to Keough, and that him wanting to have children with her, along with his increasing reliance on prescription medications, is what fractured their relationship.

Keough said hearing her mother’s voice in the recordings was at times “heartbreaking,” but she enjoyed listening to happy memories, like how her parents met and fell in love. Keough is one of two children Lisa Marie had with her first husband, musician Danny Keough, along with their late son Benjamin.

“It makes me want to tell everyone to talk to their parents and record them telling all the stories about how they met and all these things because it’s just very cool to have,” she said.

Keough’s role was to fill in parts of Lisa Marie’s story that she hadn’t gotten to before her death in January 2023 from a small bowel obstruction caused by bariatric surgery she had years prior. Some of those gaps included lighter moments and happy memories from her mother’s adult life.

“Until my mom’s addiction, really, which was when I was 25, I think we would all say that we had a really beautiful and exceptionally lucky and wonderful life,” Keough said. “I wouldn’t define our lives, collectively, as a tragedy. I think that there is so much more.”

And while those funnier, lighthearted moments, like Lisa Marie zipping through Graceland on her golf cart and Keough playing hooky from school to hang out with her mother, are detailed throughout the book, Keough said Lisa Marie wanted to write about grief and about the loss of her son.

Writing about her experience grieving her brother and detailing his death by suicide “wasn’t something that came super naturally” to Keough, but she said she knew her mother wouldn’t have shied away from it. Lisa Marie wrote that she wanted to honor her son by sparking frank conversations about suicide, addiction and mental health.

“How do I heal?” Lisa Marie writes in the book. “By helping people.”

For Keough, much of her life now has revolved around learning to live with grief and cope with the monumental losses she’s faced.

“My last four years has just been grief, like so much grief. But it’s just something that I walk around with. You just have a broken heart, and that’s just the way it is, and you just learn to live with these holes and the sadness and the pain and the love and the yearning and the missing and the confusion and all of it,” Keough said. “It’s very complicated. I think that you just have to try and allow it to be there.”

While being the daughter of the King of Rock & Roll and much of Lisa Marie's life consisted of singular experiences, but Keough said all her mother wanted through her memoir to “connect with people on a human level.

“Her goal was to tell her story so that people could relate and feel less alone in the world, which is why I think we tell stories,” Keough said. “So, that’s my goal.”

This cover image released by Random House shows "From Here to the Great Unknown" by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough. (Random House via AP)

FILE - Riley Keough, left, and her mother Lisa Marie Presley arrive at the 24th annual ELLE Women in Hollywood Awards on Oct. 16, 2017, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP, File)

NEW YORK (AP) — Linda Lavin, a Tony Award-winning stage actor who became a working class icon as a paper-hat wearing waitress on the TV sitcom “Alice,” has died. She was 87.

Lavin died in Los Angeles on Sunday of complications from recently discovered lung cancer, her representative, Bill Veloric, told The Associated Press in an email.

A success on Broadway, Lavin tried her luck in Hollywood in the mid-1970s. She was chosen to star in a new CBS sitcom based on “Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore,” the Martin Scorsese-directed film that won Ellen Burstyn an Oscar for playing the title waitress.

The title was shortened to “Alice” and Lavin become a role model for working moms as Alice Hyatt, a widowed mother with a 12-year-old son working in a roadside diner outside Phoenix. The show, with Lavin singing the theme song "There's a New Girl in Town," ran from 1976 to 1985.

The show turned “Kiss my grits” into a catchphrase and co-starred Polly Holliday as waitress Flo and Vic Tayback as the gruff owner and head chef of Mel’s Diner.

The series bounced around the CBS schedule during its first two seasons but became a hit leading into “All in the Family” on Sunday nights in October 1977. It was among primetime’s top 10 series in four of the next five seasons. Variety magazine listed it among the all-time best workplace comedies.

Lavin soon went on to win a Tony for best actress in a play for Neil Simon's “Broadway Bound” in 1987.

She was working as recently as this month promoting a new Netflix series in which she appears, “No Good Deed,” and filming a forthcoming Hulu series, “Mid-Century Modern,” according to Deadline, which first reported her death.

Lavin grew up in Portland, Maine, and moved to New York City after graduating from the College of William and Mary. She sang in nightclubs and in ensembles of shows.

Iconic producer and director Hal Prince gave Lavin her first big break while directing the Broadway musical "It's a Bird ... It's a Plane ... It's Superman." She went on to earn a Tony nomination in Simon's "Last of the Red Hot Lovers" in 1969 before winning 18 years later for another Simon play, "Broadway Bound."

In the mid 1970s, Lavin moved to Los Angeles. She had a recurring role on “Barney Miller” and in 1976 was chosen to star in a new CBS sitcom based on Ellen Burstyn’s Oscar-winning waitress comedy-drama, “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.”

Back on Broadway, Lavin later starred Paul Rudnick's comedy "The New Century," had a concert show called “Songs & Confessions of a One-Time Waitress” and earned a Tony nomination in Donald Margulies’ “Collected Stories.”

Michael Kuchwara of the AP gave Lavin a rave in “Collected Stories,” writing that she “gives one of those complete, nuanced performances, capturing the woman’s intellectual vigor, her wry sense of humor and her increasing physical frailty with astonishing fidelity. And Lavin’s sense of timing is superb, whether delivering a joke or acerbically dissecting the work of her protegee.”

Lavin basked in a burst of renewed attention in her 70s, earning a Tony nomination for Nicky Silver's "The Lyons." She also starred in "Other Desert Cities" and a revival of “Follies” before they transferred to Broadway.

The AP again raved about Lavin in “The Lyons," calling her "an absolute wonder to behold as Rita Lyons, a nag of a mother with a collection of firm beliefs and eye rolls, a matriarch who is both suffocating and keeping everyone at arm’s length."

She also appeared in the film “Wanderlust" with Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd, and released her first CD, "Possibilities." She played Jennifer Lopez's grandmother in "The Back-Up Plan."

When asked for guidance from up-and-coming actors, Lavin stressed one thing. "I say that what happened for me was that work brings work. As long as it wasn't morally reprehensible to me, I did it," she told the AP in 2011.

She and Steve Bakunas, an artist, musician and her third husband, converted an old automotive garage into the 50-seat Red Barn Studio Theatre in Wilmington, North Carolina.

It opened in 2007 and their productions include "Doubt" by John Patrick Shanley, "Glengarry Glen Ross" by David Mamet, "Rabbit Hole" by David Lindsay-Abaire and "The Tale of the Allergist's Wife" by Charles Busch, in which Lavin also starred on Broadway, earning a Tony nomination.

She returned to TV in 2013 in “Sean Saves the World,” starring “Will & Grace’s” Sean Hayes, a show which lasted a season. Lavin also made appearances on “Mom” and “9JKL.”

AP Entertainment Writer Andrew Dalton contributed from Los Angeles.

Mark Kennedy is at http://twitter.com/KennedyTwits.

FILE - Linda Lavin speaks at the 33rd annual Producers Guild Awards, March 19, 2022, at the Fairmont Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello, File)

FILE - Linda Lavin arrives at the 33rd annual Producers Guild Awards on March 19, 2022, at the Fairmont Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Chris Pizzello)