Riley Keough is admitting there’s a portion of her mother’s memoir she almost had edited out at the last moment. According to US Weekly, Keough almost had the story about her late brother, Benjamin Keough, and his death.
“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,” Keough says in the Open Book With Jenna podcast with Jenna Bush Hager.
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The memoir was published after Lisa Marie Presley’s death, with Keough co-writing parts of it and helping to get it released posthumously. The portion the actress is referring to is where Presley details how she left her son Benjamin’s body in her home for months after his 2020 death by suicide.
“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.”
For Keough, the final decision to leave it in came from one clear truth about her mother and not caring what people would say.
“I was protective of her,” Keough explains on the podcast. “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. And so, she was confused at what to do.”
Keough also covered her feelings on the moment and her mother with her portion of the memoir, explaining why to Bush Hager.
“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,’” Keough said. “It was this thing that was incomplete that I was the only person who could finish.”
