In Softly, As I Leave You: Life After Elvis, Priscilla explores the life she built in the decades following her time with Elvis, whom she met at 14, married at 21, and divorced in 1972. Released Tuesday, the book is filled with grief and reflection, tracing her journey from Memphis to Hollywood, through several relationships, and into the heartbreak of losing her daughter Lisa Marie in 2023, her only child with Elvis.

While much of the book revisits familiar chapters of her highly scrutinized life, Priscilla also offers new and intimate details. One revelation is that she became pregnant on her wedding night. “Neither Elvis nor I was ready for a child. He worried about what fatherhood would do to his career. His fans were still adjusting to him being a married man,” she writes.

She explains that she, too, was concerned about what a baby might mean for their marriage. “There would be no traveling, no romantic interludes for us to focus on each other,” she recalls. Both worried in silence until Elvis confronted the situation directly.

“He looked at me one day and asked if I wanted to have an abortion,” she shares. “He told me he’d support whatever I wanted. His words were 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!’” When Lisa Marie was born, she writes, “we fell hopelessly in love with her. We could not imagine our lives without her.”

In 1975, a few years after her divorce, Priscilla dated Robert Kardashian, father of Kim Kardashian. She admits she once hid the fact she was in bed with the attorney when Elvis called late one night to brag about a performance.

“Despite our divorce, he still couldn’t wrap his head around my being with someone else. He’d have gone ballistic, maybe literally, if he’d known Robert was in my bedroom,” she writes, recalling how Elvis often carried loaded guns.

Kardashian wanted to marry her, but Priscilla felt they weren’t truly compatible. Later, when Kardashian defended O.J. Simpson in his infamous trial, she believed it nearly destroyed him. “The realization that his friend had committed the murders nearly destroyed him,” she writes.

She remembers him tenderly in his final days, revealing that Kim Kardashian called her so they could share one last conversation before his death from cancer in 2003. “Robert and I had one last conversation before he died. He was the kindest of men, and I remember him with great affection,” she says.

When Lisa Marie married Michael Jackson in secret on May 26, 1994, Priscilla was horrified. She believed Jackson, who was older and a lifelong Elvis fan, was using her daughter to repair his image while fighting allegations of child abuse.

“I knew in my bones that Michael wasn’t marrying Lisa Marie; he was marrying the Presley dynasty,” Priscilla writes. “I didn’t believe he loved her. Michael was a manipulative man, and I think he had his sights set on her long before she realized it.”

Lisa Marie confided to her mother that Jackson wanted them to have a child. Priscilla strongly advised against it. “I didn’t trust his motives. A child would be a proof of virility. And I couldn’t help wondering if he wanted to have Elvis’s grandchild,” she writes.

Lisa Marie allegedly admitted they had a physical relationship but rarely saw each other. At one point, she told Priscilla, “Michael says that if I don’t want to have a baby, Debbie Rowe will have one with him.” Priscilla recalls thinking, “Big red flag. Thank God, Lisa agreed with me that it was better to wait.”

Lisa Marie filed for divorce from Jackson on Jan. 18, 1996, less than two years into their marriage. “She had begun to feel like the marriage was a setup,” Priscilla writes. “He didn’t want to be with her; he wanted to be with Elvis Presley’s daughter.”

Priscilla also writes about the year she was granted guardianship of her twin granddaughters, Harper and Finley. She calls it one of “the best and most difficult” times of her life. The experience brought her joy but also heightened tensions with Lisa Marie, who wanted full custody of the twins during her divorce. Lisa Marie asked Priscilla to sign a deposition claiming that her estranged husband Michael Lockwood was unfit.

“I told her I couldn’t sign it, for I had never seen Michael behave in the harmful ways she was alleging,” Priscilla recalls. “Signing it would be perjury. To her, it was a betrayal.”

The memoir also addresses Lisa Marie’s struggles with addiction. Priscilla reveals her daughter’s drug use spiraled during her split from Lockwood, reaching up to 80 pills a day.

“Though she had left the church, she retained some of its beliefs, including a distrust of psychologists,” Priscilla writes. “She was still opposed to therapy, which would have given her a potential outlet for her feelings.”

Lisa Marie eventually entered rehab in 2016. In a 2018 interview with Today, she admitted, “I was not happy. I have a therapist, and she said, ‘You are a miracle, you really are.’ She said, ‘I don’t know how you’re still alive.’”