Elvis Presley died when his daughter, Lisa Marie, was nine years old. They had a close relationship, and his death devastated her. Her daughter, Riley Keough, said she still saw the effects of this loss decades later. She believed her mother spent her entire life in a state of heartbreak.

Lisa Marie Presley grieved Elvis all through her life

While Lisa Marie didn’t talk about her grief, Keough said it came through clearly.

“Sometimes I’d walk into my mom’s bedroom and find her sitting on the floor alone, drunk, listening to her father’s music, crying,” Keough wrote in the book From Here to the Great Unknown, Lisa Marie’s memoir. “But she’d never talk about it, or listen to his music sober.”

Keough believed her mother had only just begun to process the loss of her father at the very end of her life. Her pain was so clear to Keough during childhood that she began to resent Elvis.

“I don’t think she ever processed the loss,” Keough wrote. “I think she started to the last year she was alive — she only began using terms like trauma as late as 2021. But I certainly knew that she was heartbroken my whole life. I remember when I was little feeling angry at Elvis for leaving my mother and causing all this pain.”

Lisa Marie Presley said she saw her father as a god

Lisa Marie felt the loss so acutely because she looked to Elvis with adoration. He seemed to be more than human to her.

“I felt my father could change the weather,” she wrote. “He was a god to me. A chosen human being.”

She even believed he could control the atmosphere, a sentiment that was echoed by multiple people in Elvis’ life.

“He had that thing where you could see his soul,” she wrote. “If he was in a s****y mood, it was s****y outside; if it was storming, it was because he was about to go off. I believed back then that he could make it storm.”

Her relationship with her mother was more complicated

Lisa Marie’s relationship with her mother, Priscilla Presley, was more fraught.

“My mother told me that she’d thought about trying to fall off her horse to cause a miscarriage,” she wrote. “She didn’t want to gain pregnancy weight. She thought that wouldn’t be a good look for her as Elvis’ wife. There were so many women after him, all of them beautiful. She wanted his undivided attention. She was so upset that she was pregnant that initially she’d only eat apples and eggs and never gained much weight.”

Lisa Marie wondered if her relationship with her mother negatively affected her development.

“I was a pain in her a** immediately and I always felt she didn’t want me,” she wrote. “I believe in energy in utero, so maybe I already felt her vibe of trying to get rid of me. Eventually she just kind of decided to keep me, but at the time, she didn’t have great maternal instincts. That might be what’s wrong with me.”