The curtain is being lifted on Lisa Marie Presley’s dependancy struggles.
Within the late star’s posthumous memoir From Here to the Great Unknown, which her daughter Riley Keough accomplished after her mother’s demise at age 54 in 2023, she discusses how she grew to become hooked on prescription painkillers following the 2008 beginning of her twins Finley and Harper (with ex Michael Lockwood, her husband from 2006 to 2021).
“For a few years it was leisure after which it wasn’t,” Lisa Marie says within the ebook, excerpted solely on this week’s PEOPLE cowl story. “It was an absolute matter of dependancy, withdrawal within the huge leagues.”
Lisa Marie previously spoke about her addiction to painkillers and opioids within the foreword for Harry Nelson’s 2019 ebook The United States of Opioids: A Prescription for Liberating a Nation in Pain.
“It’s possible you’ll learn this and marvel how, after dropping individuals near me, I additionally fell prey to opioids,” she wrote. “I used to be recovering after the beginning of my daughters, Vivienne and Finley, when a health care provider prescribed me opioids for ache. It solely took a short-term prescription of opioids within the hospital for me to really feel the necessity to hold taking them.”
Dependancy had lengthy been part of Lisa Marie’s life: Her father, Elvis Presley, and her ex-husband Michael Jackson each died of problems from drug use. Lisa Marie has additionally stated she’d experimented with medication throughout her teen years.
To complete From Right here to the Nice Unknown, which she had promised Lisa Marie she’d assist write previous to her demise, Riley, 35, listened to taped recollections her mother had recorded. Riley says her “mother’s descent into dependancy” was an “extremely tough” chapter to write down, as had been the chapters about her demise and the 2020 suicide death of her brother Benjamin after his personal battle with dependancy.
Riley says within the introduction of the ebook that, at occasions, her mother “seems like she desires to burn the world to the bottom; different occasions, she shows compassion and empathy — all aspects of the lady who was my mom, every of these strands, stunning and damaged, solid collectively in early trauma, crashing collectively on the finish of her life.”
By means of the ebook, Riley hopes readers see her mom clearly, maybe for the primary time.
“I hope that in a rare circumstance, individuals relate to a really human expertise of affection, heartbreak, loss, dependancy and household,” she tells PEOPLE in an e mail interview. “[My mom] needed to write down a ebook within the hopes that somebody might learn her story and relate to her, to know that they’re not alone on this planet. Her hope with this ebook was simply human connection. In order that’s mine.”
For extra on Riley Keough ending her mother Lisa Marie Presley’s highly effective memoir, choose up the newest subject of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribe here.
From Here to the Great Unknown by Lisa Marie Presley and Riley Keough comes out Oct. 8 and is accessible for preorder now, wherever books are bought.