LIVING day to day without
any certainty is like being on the Titanic that won’t sink but is filled
with water, and sinking.
It may be time to explain what adventures in livingness are; not just to you but to myself. The suspense: it drives us, we don’t have a cupboard of familiarity, it keeps changing, like the weather, most of us are single in this department. Sometimes acts of God and nature intervene, so we have no control over the next hour or the next year. The essentials, a home, food on the table, and some circle of family or friends that will hug you and say, I understand instead of ‘everything works out in the end.’ Imagination plays the hand in this kind of living, we dream a lot, we plan and then we change the plan, we are adaptable and that is what we strive for, to be adaptable, to lifestyles, cultures, location, and unfamiliar walks on roads our sneakers don’t know.
LUELLEN SMILEY ADVENTURERS IN LIVINGNESS
Where Gaps of Expression are Liberated
ABOUT
Luellen Smiley is a creative nonfiction writer, author, columnist, and historian whose writing is deeply rooted in a controversial personal history. She is the daughter of Allen Smiley, a close friend, associate, and business partner of notorious Las Vegas gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. Her father was sitting only feet from Siegel when Siegel was murdered in Beverly Hills on June 20, 1947.
That extraordinary childhood history became the foundation for Smiley’s first book, Cradle of Crime: A Daughter’s Tribute, published in 2017. The memoir explores what it was like to grow up as the daughter of a man connected to organized crime while trying to reconcile her love for her father with the secrecy, fear, and criminal world surrounding him.
Smiley’s work has appeared in publications including the New York Post, MORE Magazine, Southern California newspapers, and Authorlink. She wrote the newspaper column Smiley’s Dice—Adventures in Livingness, which earned a Blue-Ribbon Award from the California Newspapers Association for her Growing Up With Gangsters columns.
Her interest in her father’s history also led her to become a researcher and commentator on organized crime history. She has participated in television, radio, and documentary interviews.
Smiley’s next book, Gaslighting Greta, will be published this year. A personal story that reads like fiction. Her own website describes the project as exploring a woman whose life is destabilized by gaslighting and psychological manipulation.
Her writing career reflects a recurring theme: using personal experience and research to uncover the truth behind complicated relationships and extraordinary lives. From the secretive world surrounding her father and Bugsy Siegel to the deeply personal territory of Gaslighting Greta, Smiley’s work transforms difficult experiences into stories of survival, discovery, and ultimately reclaiming one’s voice.
Luellen Smiley is an author whose life has given her an unusual perspective on secrecy, manipulation, family loyalty, betrayal, and survival—and she uses that perspective as the raw material for her nonfiction storytelling.
One response to “UNCERTAINTY LIVING”
Great post, great insight.
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