TRIGGER WARNING: This article contains references to death and substance abuse.
The only child of Elvis and Priscilla Presley, Lisa Marie, suffered from a severe opioid addiction in her later years. The singer — who passed away at age 54 in January 2023 of small bowel obstruction, a long-term complication from bariatric surgery — revealed details about her addiction issues in her forthcoming posthumous memoir.
“It escalated to 80 pills a day,” she writes. “It took more and more to get high, and I honestly don’t know when your body decides it can’t deal with it anymore. But it does decide at some point,” she added. The late singer revealed that her addiction quickly transitioned from being recreational to destructive.
It became a serious matter of addiction and withdrawal in the big leagues. “I just wanted to check out. It was too painful to be sober,” she added. In the memoir, Riley Keough — who finished the memoir listening to the self-recorded tapes left by her late mother — revealed that Lisa Marie consumed opioids to relieve pain during her c-section delivery.
“Then she progressed to taking them to sleep,” but felt “shame” about her drug addiction when she had two young children to take care of. After being hospitalized for her addiction, Lisa Marie was sent to rehab, where she decided to have bariatric surgery. However, Riley felt that her mom wasn’t ready to be sober.
Although she didn’t consume narcotics after getting out of rehab, she did get high on “the post-rehab cocktail” which again led to her hospitalization, this time for a seizure. “She had been very chastened by the seizure,” Riley writes.
In an interview with PEOPLE, the Daisy Jones and The Six actress revealed how hard it was to write some chapters of her mother’s memoir, like her addiction issue and the 2020 suicide death of her brother Benjamin after his own struggle with addiction.
With this memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, Riley hopes to illuminate who her mother really was. “I hope that in an extraordinary circumstance, people relate to a very human experience of love, heartbreak, loss, addiction, and family,” she told the outlet. Her late mother had hoped to inspire people with her story which is now Riley’s wish too.
From Here to the Great Unknown is available now.
