Riley Keough is reflecting on what a “bizarre” turn her life has taken.
It has been an eventful last few years for the actress, who since 2020 has lost her younger brother Benjamin Keough to suicide, lost her mom Lisa Marie Presley, who died after going into cardiac arrest aged 54, had a legal battle with her grandmother Priscilla Presley, and welcomed her first daughter, Tupelo Storm, with husband Ben Smith-Petersen.
Now, following the release of her mom’s posthumous memoir, From Here to the Great Unknown, which she helped finish, she is shedding light on what it has really been like.
Speaking on the Sibling Revelry podcast, hosted by siblings Kate and Oliver Hudson, Riley addressed whether it still feels “surreal” that her mom isn’t here anymore.
“A lot of my life and the last ten years feels very surreal, and I spend a lot of my time going ‘What the [expletive] just happened?'” she confessed.
Riley explained: “From about 2016 until now, my life has been very bizarre, so [there’s] a lot of trying to process what happened because we had this very normal, seemingly great life, and then everything sort of got turned upside down around 2016 and around when my mom’s addiction started.”
© Michael Ochs Archives“So it’s definitely — I’m still processing the difference in my whole childhood and early 20s into now, and there’s been so much,” she continued, adding: “So I do, I wake up in the middle of the night and I’m like, ‘What the [expletive],’ like this is crazy.”
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After Oliver inquired about Lisa Marie’s addiction, and the fact that it came to be in her 40s as opposed to when she was younger, Riley also explained: “I think it was a combination of different things, she always would say, ‘If I was to try drugs, they would take me out because I’m the kind of person who goes hard,’ basically.”
© GettyShe further shared: “She would say that all the time and she always had her father [Elvis Presley] in mind and I think that she basically, I don’t know, she had a C-section, was given oxycontin, and got really addicted.”
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© InstagramElvis similarly struggled with drug and alcohol addiction, and died aged 42; the immediate cause of death was listed as cardiac arrest, as a result of cardiac arrhythmia combined with his drug use and unhealthy eating habits.
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© Dave M. BenettRiley, who is an older sister to twins Harper and Finley, born in 2008, continued: “I think it also numbed the pain that was probably there, kind of growing her whole life. It was kind of an emptiness that grew, and I think around that time she had also lost a lot of her friends in her community, so there were a lot of things at play in that exact moment.”
Finally, as the podcast episode wrapped up, Oliver noted that despite all that she has been through, Riley has a “gentleness” to her, and she joked: “Don’t be fooled Oliver I have mad anxiety,” emphasizing: “I get that a lot, where people are like, ‘You’re so chill and grounded,’ or whatever, and I’m like, I have crazy anxiety.”
