- Lisa Marie Presley said in her posthumous memoir that getting an abortion was the “stupidest” thing she did.
- Presley was devastated after and “plotted” to get pregnant again with then-boyfriend Danny Keough.
- She got pregnant and married Keough in October 1988.
In her posthumous memoir, Lisa Marie Presley detailed the calculated steps she took in order to get pregnant by Danny Keough after regretting an earlier abortion.
Presley, who died at 54 years old in 2023, wrote about their relationship in “From Here to the Great Unknown,” released Tuesday. It was cowritten by her and Keough’s daughter, Riley Keough.
Presley met Danny when she was 17 and he was 21. He was the bass player in a band called D’bat and Presley recalled being attracted to his cockiness and confidence.
They initially dated for four months and during that time, Presley had an ectopic pregnancy, which she mistook for a burst appendix. The pair broke up and Presley said that she was “stuck and obsessed” with him afterward.
“I didn’t know what I wanted except that I wanted to be with Danny,” Presley said. “And I knew that I needed to have children with Danny, too, which is the weirdest, craziest part of it. I felt like I was supposed to have children with him —I somehow knew that we would always be connected, that it would always be OK, that it would never be a bad situation for a child.”
Presley and Danny got back together and at 19 years old, she got pregnant again. However, they chose not to have the baby and she regretted it.
“That second time, I didn’t know what to do, and neither did Danny,” she said. “I ended up having an abortion. And it was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my whole life. I was devastated. I did it and we both cried. We were both destroyed and not long after that we fell apart and broke up. I couldn’t live with myself.”
Presley said that she was so upset with herself for having an abortion that she “made a plan” to get pregnant again.
“I planned and I plotted and I schemed,” she wrote.
Presley said she purposely arranged a trip to visit Danny, who was on a cruise ship with his band. They spent a night together in Aruba, with Danny oblivious to her intentions.
“Danny had no idea of my plan,” Presley said. “But I didn’t really care anymore what he thought about it. I didn’t care if he wanted to be part of it or not. I felt that I had to redeem, to make amends, because I still couldn’t believe I had had an abortion.”
Two weeks later, she took a pregnancy test and told Danny that it was positive.
“Danny knew he had to marry me,” Presley said. “I trapped him. I didn’t really mean to, but I did.”
Riley, for her part, said in the memoir that Presley “absolutely meant to trap my dad.” She said that her dad was “in shock because he never planned to be married or have kids.”
(Danny Keough wasn’t immediately available for comment.)
Presley and Danny got married in October 1988 and welcomed their first child, daughter Riley, in May 1989. The couple had a second child together, a son named Benjamin Keough, and got divorced in 1994.
In her memoir, Presley said that being a mom gave her a purpose.
“I feel in love with being a mom,” she said. “I realized I had been called to care for something else. Being a mom was everything to me and Riley was the most precious gem.”
Lisa Marie’s revealing book has been in the works for several years. Back in 2019, Page Six reported that Lisa Marie’s book deal was estimated to be between $3 and 4 million.
Although the memoir was released days ago, it’s already become a bestseller on Amazon and is Oprah Winfrey’s latest selection for her book club.
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