Priscilla Presley says it’s ‘unbelievable’ how fast twin granddaughters are growing up

Priscilla Presley opened up about how she couldn’t believe how quickly her twin granddaughters Harper and Finley Lockwood are growing up.

Priscilla, 79, shared People On Saturday she found it ‘unbelievable’ that they are already 16, while she continues to see them ‘as little children’.

The ex-wife of the late Elvis Presley talks to the outlet at the Last Chance for Animals’ 40th Anniversary Gala held in Los Angeles at Paramount Studios, telling the outlet that the twin girls, whose father is musician Michael Lockwood, 63, are “nice ‘ are. be with.’

Priscilla — mother of the late Lisa Marie Presley, who died last year at age 54, and grandmother of actress Riley Keough, 35 — celebrated her granddaughters’ high school graduation. an Instagram post from June 2023.

‘Happy graduation girls! You’re in high school now!!!’ said Priscilla, who posed in a photo with the twins and Keough around the time they reached a legal settlement over arrangements over Lisa Marie’s estate.

Priscilla, who has appeared in films including The Naked Gun trilogy and The Adventures of Ford Fairlane, welcomed the twins “for a period of time” while Lisa Marie and Lockwood battled for custody of the girls in the wake of their 2016 divorce , which ended their divorce. decade long marriage.

According to the publication, Priscilla and the twins spent time together during the coronavirus pandemic, fostering puppies.

Lisa Marie, with ex-husband Danny Keough, was also mother to Riley and late son Benjamin Keough, who tragically committed suicide in 2020, from which Riley said her late mother never fully recovered emotionally.

It’s been an eventful month for the famous family, as Harper and Finley celebrated their 16th anniversary on Oct. 7, a day before their mother Lisa Marie’s posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, written in part by Riley, was released.

Riley quickly agreed to help complete her mother’s memoir and thought they would write it together, reflecting on her extraordinary upbringing and life, but it became a much greater responsibility after Lisa Marie’s sudden death in 2023.

Completing the task that her mother — the only child of Elvis and Priscilla Presley and an artist herself — had begun years earlier “aroused all kinds of emotions,” Keough told The Associated Press before the book’s release.

“It just felt like some kind of duty that I had to do for her,” Riley said. “I’m just happy that it’s done and that it will be out in the world for people to read.”

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

The book, Oprah Winfrey’s latest book club program, covers themes of “love and loss and grief and mothers and daughters and addiction,” Riley said, adding that it was intended as a way for Lisa Marie to tell her story in her own way. narrate. words and connecting with others.

Indeed, much of the book is in the words of Lisa Marie, as Riley listened faithfully to recordings of her mother recounting memories and experiences both large 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 the death of her son Benjamin in 2020, among many other parts of her life.

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

She also wrote that Graceland became a “free for all” on the day of Presley’s death in 1977, with attendees taking jewelry and personal items “before he was even declared dead.”

Lisa Marie’s candid writing extends to the section focusing on her marriage to Jackson that made headlines from 1994 to 1996. She wrote that Jackson confessed his love for her while she was still married to Keough, and that he wanted to have with her children. with his increasing dependence on prescription medications is what broke their relationship.

Riley said hearing her mother’s voice in the recordings was “heartbreaking” at times, but she enjoyed listening to happy memories, such as how her parents met and fell in love.

“It makes me want to tell everyone to talk to their parents and record them and tell all the stories of how they met and all this stuff because it’s just a really cool thing to have,” she said.

Riley’s role was to fill in parts of Lisa Marie’s story that she had not gotten to before her death in January 2023 due to a small bowel obstruction caused by a bariatric surgery she had undergone years earlier. Those gaps included lighter moments and happy memories of her mother’s adult life.

“Until my mother’s addiction, actually, when I was 25, I think we would all say we had a very beautiful, exceptionally happy, wonderful life,” Riley said. “I wouldn’t define our lives, collectively, as a tragedy. I think there’s so much more.’

And while those funnier, lighter moments, like Lisa Marie zooming around Graceland on her golf cart and Keough skipping school to hang out with her mother, are detailed throughout the book, Keough said Lisa Marie talks about grief and about the loss wanted to write. of her son.

Writing about her experiences grieving for her brother and describing his death by suicide “wasn’t something that came very naturally” to Riley, 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 candid conversations about suicide, addiction and mental health.

‘How do I heal?’ Lisa Marie writes in the book. ‘By helping people.’

For Riley, much of her life now revolves around learning to live with grief and dealing with the tremendous losses she faces.

“My last four years have been nothing but sadness, like so much sadness,” Riley said. ‘But it’s just something I walk around with. You’re just heartbroken, 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 longing and the loss and the confusion and all that.

‘It’s very complicated. I think you just have to try to allow it.”