The new revealing memories of Priscilla Presley in 7 appointments

Now 80 years, Priscilla Presley is looking back in a life formed by love, loss and legacy.

In your new memory, Softly, while I leave you: life after Elvis, She reflects on the collapse of her six -year marriage with Elvis Presley. The book goes beyond Graceland’s myth to reveal the most sincere confessions of Priscilla so far, offering a look without ornaments for their marriage, its regrets and the complicated ties that gave it much after the death of the singer.

The pages cover everything, from his brief romance with Robert Kardashian to his fractured relationship with his daughter Lisa Marie Presley. Here are seven of the most revealing moments of the book.

“Marriage horrified me. I knew in my bones that Michael (Jackson) did not marry Lisa Marie; she married the Presley dynasty.”

Priscilla disapproved Lisa Marie’s relationship with Jackson. She writes that “she did not believe she loved” his daughter and believes that the “manipulative” singer had hidden reasons, since he needed a good press in the midst of accusations of child abuse.

“The King of Pop was allied with the King of Rock and Roll,” says Priscilla. “Photos of him with Elvis’s daughter with the huge diamond compromise ring she had made for her? That image was pure gold.”

Priscilla states that Jackson contacted Lisa Marie when child abuse positions were made public. “I think that’s how he hooked her at the beginning,” he continues. “She felt sorry for him, and naturally, believed in her innocence. No one wants to believe that kind of accusations against someone they know.”

Jackson, accused of child abuse in 1993, denied the charges. He and Lisa Marie married the following year and separated in 1995.

“It would have become a ballistic, perhaps literally, if I knew that Robert was in my room … Elvis always wore a loaded gun, sometimes more than one.”

Two years after his separation from Elvis, Priscilla found himself in a brief but memorable romance with Robert Kardashian. The two began to leave in 1975, long before Kardashian became a family name as a lawyer and high -power father of the famous family.

In her new book, Priscilla reveals that Elvis still called her late at night, sometimes without realizing that she was no longer his. She remembers an instance when the phone rang around 2 in the morning, while in bed with Kardashian. “Fortunately, (Robert) was a solid sleep,” he writes, pointing out how he hastened to grab the receiver before he woke it up. She was on tiptoe down the hall to take the call to another room, listening to Elvis’s well -known voice. Neither of them knew about the other.

“Despite our divorce, I still couldn’t understand my being with another person,” writes Priscilla about Elvis, who died in 1977.

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

“I thought about my girl, my wild, rebel and passionate girl, lying in a vegetative state for the rest of her life. I said what I had to do.

One of the most heartbreaking passages in Priscilla’s memoirs recounts his final moments with his daughter. Lisa Marie died in 2023 at 54 years of a small intestinal obstruction, a complication related to previous bariatric surgery.

Priscilla says he knew the truth at the time he entered the room of his daughter’s hospital. “I was hooked on a machine that breathed for her, and had a heartbeat. There was little brain activity,” he writes. “His spirit, always so vital, wasn’t there.”

She describes spending hours in Lisa Marie’s bed with the family, clinging to hope until the doctors gave the words they feared: “Priscilla, I’m very sorry, he has left.” The pain, writes, is still unbearable. Lisa Marie had never recovered completely after losing her son Benjamin Keough for suicide in 2020, and Priscilla believes that her daughter longed to meet him. “She wanted to be with Ben,” she says.

“I didn’t leave Elvis because I didn’t love him … I left Elvis because I needed his own life.”

Priscilla is Frank about the collapse of his marriage to Elvis, writing that “I loved him both the day I left as the day we got married,” but the relationship had deteriorated for years.

Maternity brought new layers of guilt and distance. She admits to feel jealous of a babysitter who attended Lisa Marie in the middle of the night, a role that she believed should have been filling. In addition to that, the intimacy between her and Elvis faded after the birth of her daughter.

“I had never been able to make love with a woman who had had a child,” he recalls. For Elvis, the women who became mothers belonged to a pedestal, including Priscilla. “It is impossible to make love on a pedestal,” he writes.

Although Elvis remained “flirtatious and very affectionate,” Priscilla says that her physical relationship ended largely, apart from one last time after she decided to leave. Elvis suspected that his adventure with Karate Mike Stone instructor was the reason for divorce, but Priscilla is clear that Stone was “just a catalyst.” She states that Elvis “forced” her after discovering about Stone. His marriage was tarnished by infidelity on both sides.

“My daughter was an enigma, complicated and challenging.”

When describing Lisa Marie as “a free spirit, a specific and restless soul,” Priscilla opens on how his daughter was “so broken” after Elvis’s death. Priscilla admits that she was the one who first presented her daughter to Scientology, through her friend John Travolta, a decision that now calls “naive.”

Lisa Marie, writes, fought through years of financial problems and addictions, at one time consuming up to 80 pills per day. Even so, she was a fierce personality who owns her identity as Elvis’s only daughter, often calling herself “Lisa Marie F —ing Presley”. It was both a shield and a burden: “An identity that fell in love and pursued her for the rest of her life.”

Priscilla also reflects on his own early motherhood. She was pregnant with Lisa Marie on her wedding night, a turn that returned to her dreams and left her and Elvis feeling without preparation. “Neither Elvis nor I were ready for a child,” he recalls. For weeks, they worried silently about what was ahead, and Priscilla even admits that he once asked if a spontaneous abortion could save them. At its lowest point, Elvis asked if he wanted an abortion, promising to support it no matter what.

At that moment, writes Priscilla, it was a call for attention. “The enormity hit me in front, and I began to cry. I said: ‘No! We can’t do that. This is our baby!'”

“Sign it would be perjury … for her, it was a betrayal.”

Priscilla writes about the deep crack that formed between her and Lisa Marie during the controversial divorce of her daughter of Michael Lockwood. In 2017, Lisa Marie accused Lockwood of abuse and misconduct, although she denied the accusations, and a judicial investigation did not find evidence to support them.

Apparently, Lisa Marie asked her mother to sign a statement to declare Lockwood not suitable for the custody of her twin daughters, Harper and Finley. Priscilla refused. “I had never seen Michael behave in the harmful ways she was claiming,” she says. Priscilla says that he knew at that time his relationship would never recover completely. “With a stab in my heart that would never forgive me completely,” he writes. “And she never did.”

“People yearn for true love, of the guy in which you fall more and more until you realize that it has no background,” writes Priscilla. “I found it before being old enough to understand it.”

Priscilla suggests that there was a time when reconciliation with Elvis did not feel impossible. A Christmas after his divorce, when he left his house, kissed his forehead, stopped and said gently: “Someday. Maybe someday.”

She admits that Elvis remains the reason why she has never married or followed another serious relationship. “I lost the opportunity to find it again with Elvis,” he writes. “Because he never had the opportunity to age.”