Riley Keough almost removed the story about her late brother, Benjamin Keough, from mom Lisa Marie Presley’s memoir — but decided against it.
“My brother’s body was something I thought about taking out, but my mom was so — in the tapes — does not give a s— that people would know that,” Riley, 35, said during a Thursday, December 12, appearance on Jenna Bush Hager’s “Open Book With Jenna” podcast.
Riley cowrote and helped to posthumously release Presley’s memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, in October. In one chapter, Presley — who died from a heart attack at age 54 in 2023 — recalled leaving her son Benjamin’s body in her home “for two months” following his 2020 death. (Benjamin died by suicide at age 27.)
“I think it would scare the living f—ing piss out of anybody else to have their son there like that,” Presley wrote. “But not me.”
After thinking it through, Riley decided that “there was no part” of Presley that would care what people said. So, that anecdote was included in the book.
Riley noted that From Here to the Great Unknown is a “pretty honest portrayal” of her late mother. The actress’ goal was to “as true as possible” when completing the memoir. “I was protective of her,” she added.
“I think when my brother passed away, she didn’t want to write about anything but my brother. And she wanted to write about grief, but she’d already started, you know, an autobiography,” Riley explained during Thursday’s podcast episode. “And so, she was confused at what to do.”
Presley asked Riley to assist with the memoir before she died. Following her mother’s 2023 death, the Daisy Jones & The Six star completed the book. Presley and Riley’s account of what happened are designated by different fonts.
In her reflection of Benjamin’s death, Riley recalled being the one to tell her mother that he had died. “We all knew my mom was going to die of a broken heart,” she wrote about Presley in the aftermath of Benjamin’s passing.
“I think she really wanted it to feel elegant and true to her, but she also didn’t like talking about herself and she was very shy. So, I think that her thought was like, ‘You know me better than I know me,’” Riley explained to Bush Hager. “It was this thing that was incomplete that I was the only person who could finish.”
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