Priscilla Presley’s revealing new memoir in 7 quotes

Now 80, Priscilla Presley is looking back on a life shaped by love, loss and legacy.

In her new memoir, Softly, as I Leave You: Life After Elvis, she reflects on the unraveling of her six-year marriage to Elvis Presley. The book moves beyond the myth of Graceland to reveal Priscilla’s most candid confessions yet, offering an unvarnished look at her marriage, her regrets and the complicated ties that shaped her long after the singer’s death.

The pages span everything from her brief romance with Robert Kardashian to her fractured relationship with daughter Lisa Marie Presley. Here are seven of the book’s most revealing moments.

“I was appalled by the marriage. I knew in my bones that Michael [Jackson] wasn’t marrying Lisa Marie; he was marrying the Presley dynasty.”

Priscilla disapproved of Lisa Marie’s relationship with Jackson. She writes that she “didn’t believe he loved” her daughter and believes the “manipulative” singer had ulterior motives as he needed good press amid child abuse allegations.

“The King of Pop was allying himself with the King of Rock and Roll,” Priscilla says. “Photos of him with Elvis’s daughter wearing the huge diamond engagement ring he’d had made for her? That image was pure gold.”

Priscilla claims Jackson reached out to Lisa Marie when the child abuse charges went public. “I think that’s how he hooked her in the beginning,” she continues. “She felt sorry for him, and naturally, she believed in his innocence. Nobody wants to believe those kinds of allegations against someone they know.”

Jackson, who was accused of child molestation in 1993, denied the charges. He and Lisa Marie wed the following year and split in 1995.

“He’d have gone ballistic, maybe literally, if he’d known Robert was in my bedroom… Elvis always carried a loaded gun, sometimes more than one.”

Two years after her split from Elvis, Priscilla found herself in a brief but memorable romance with Robert Kardashian. The two began dating in 1975, long before Kardashian became a household name as a high-powered attorney and father to the famous family.

In her new book, Priscilla reveals that Elvis was still calling her late at night — sometimes without realizing she was no longer his. She recalls one instance when the phone rang around 2 a.m., while she was in bed with Kardashian. “Fortunately, [Robert] was a sound sleeper,” she writes, noting how she scrambled to grab the receiver before it woke him. She tiptoed down the hall to take the call in another room, listening to Elvis’s familiar voice. Neither man ever knew about the other.

“Despite our divorce, he still couldn’t wrap his head around my being with someone else,” Priscilla writes of Elvis, who died in 1977.

Kardashian, who died from esophageal cancer in 2003 at age 59, dated Priscilla for about a year. Though she described him as “a sweet man” she genuinely liked, their relationship eventually unraveled. His demanding work schedule kept him away for long hours, and Priscilla admits they were in different places in life. “Robert wanted to get married, but I knew it wouldn’t work,” she recalls. “I wasn’t ready to marry again.”

“I thought about my girl, my wild, rebellious, passionate girl, lying in a vegetative state for the rest of her life. I said what I had to. ‘Take her off the machine, Doctor.’ My voice was barely above a whisper.”

One of the most heartbreaking passages in Priscilla’s memoir recounts her final moments with her daughter. Lisa Marie died in 2023 at age 54 from a small bowel obstruction, a complication linked to prior bariatric surgery.

Priscilla says she knew the truth the moment she walked into her daughter’s hospital room. “She was hooked to a machine that was breathing for her, and she had a heartbeat. There was little brain activity,” she writes. “Her spirit, always so vital, wasn’t there.”

She describes spending hours at Lisa Marie’s bedside with family, clinging to hope until doctors delivered the words they’d been dreading: “Priscilla, I’m so sorry, she’s gone.” The grief, she writes, remains unbearable. Lisa Marie had never fully recovered after losing her son Benjamin Keough to suicide in 2020, and Priscilla believes her daughter longed to be reunited with him. “She wanted to be with Ben,” she says.

“I did not leave Elvis because I no longer loved him. … I left Elvis because I needed a life of my own.”

Priscilla is frank about the unraveling of her marriage to Elvis, writing that she “loved him as much on the day I left as on the day we married,” but the relationship had been deteriorating for years.

Motherhood brought new layers of guilt and distance. She admits to feeling jealous of a nanny who tended to Lisa Marie in the middle of the night, a role she believed she should have been filling. On top of that, intimacy between her and Elvis faded after the birth of their daughter.

“He had never been able to make love to a woman who’d had a child,” she recalls. To Elvis, women who became mothers belonged on a pedestal — including Priscilla. “It is impossible to make love on a pedestal,” she writes.

Although Elvis remained “flirtatious and very affectionate,” Priscilla says their physical relationship largely ended, aside from one final time after she decided to leave. Elvis suspected her affair with karate instructor Mike Stone was the reason for the divorce, but Priscilla is clear that Stone was “just one catalyst.” She claims Elvis “forced” himself on her after finding out about Stone. Their marriage was marred by infidelity on both sides.

“My daughter was a conundrum, complicated and challenging.”

Describing Lisa Marie as “a free spirit, a determined and restless soul,” Priscilla opens up about how her daughter was left “so broken” after Elvis’s death. Priscilla admits she was the one who first introduced her daughter to Scientology, via friend John Travolta, a decision she now calls “naive.”

Lisa Marie, she writes, struggled through years of financial trouble and addiction, at one point consuming as many as 80 pills a day. Still, she was a fierce personality who owned her identity as Elvis’s only child, often calling herself “Lisa Marie F—ing Presley.” It was both a shield and a burden: “an identity that both enamored and haunted her for the rest of her life.”

Priscilla also reflects on her own early motherhood. She became pregnant with Lisa Marie on her wedding night, a turn that upended her dreams and left both her and Elvis feeling unprepared. “Neither Elvis nor I was ready for a child,” she recalls. For weeks, they silently worried about what was ahead, and Priscilla even admits she once wondered if a miscarriage might spare them. At her lowest point, Elvis asked if she wanted an abortion, promising to support her no matter what.

At that moment, Priscilla writes, was a wake-up call. “The enormity of it hit me head-on, and I began to cry. I told him, ‘No! We can’t do that. This is our baby!’”

“Signing it would be perjury. … To her, it was a betrayal.”

Priscilla writes about the deep rift that formed between her and Lisa Marie during her daughter’s contentious divorce from Michael Lockwood. In 2017, Lisa Marie accused Lockwood of abuse and misconduct, though he denied the allegations, and a court investigation found no evidence to support them.

Lisa Marie apparently asked her mother to sign a deposition declaring Lockwood unfit for custody of their twin daughters, Harper and Finley. Priscilla refused. “I had never seen Michael behave in the harmful ways she was alleging,” she says. Priscilla says she knew in that moment their relationship would never fully recover. “With a stab to my heart that she would never completely forgive me,” she writes. “And she never did.”

“People long for true love, the kind where you fall deeper and deeper until you realize it is bottomless,” Priscilla writes. “I found it before I was old enough to understand it.”

Priscilla hints that there was a time when reconciliation with Elvis didn’t feel impossible. One Christmas after their divorce, as he was leaving her house, he kissed her forehead, paused, and said softly, “Someday. Maybe someday.”

She admits that Elvis remains the reason she’s never remarried or pursued another serious relationship. “I lost the chance to find it again with Elvis,” she writes. “Because he never had the chance to grow old.”