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 and contributed artifacts connected with her father’s history to the Las Vegas Mob Experience.

Smiley’s next book, Gaslighting Greta, will be published this year. A personal story that reads like fiction centered on gaslighting, betrayal, friendship, and the struggle to reclaim one’s identity. 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.

RUMINATING ON RELATIONSHIPS


Bob and Baez-JIM MARSHALL
Bob and Baez-JIM MARSHALL

 

Bob and Baez-JIM MARSHALL

He was going to keep me warm this winter. Toggle behind me in his overcoat and boots, making  sure I didn’t slip on ice, or chop my hair when my anger meets my self destructiveness. He would plow the snow, keep the fire going, trim the roses that bloomed when we met, and hatch chilies in the kitchen. A boy, a man, and a girlfriend. He’s wrapped in primitive sensuality, gifted with athletic stamina, viscerally intelligent. There is the other side; a squadron of pointy fingers, family feuds, gossip, and the spark of emotional self-contentedness. He admits to it; and studies masters of consciousness every day. He strives for breath unscented, unencumbered childlike weightlessness. My star is dropping, the dream girl of adventures in livingness. Taking men in that hold impossible odds, the long shot that shoot you to the moon or dump you on a dirty bench.
I found someone once who held up all the right que cards; now we are best friends thirty years later. If
lovers are true friends than I don’t lock them out when they stumble on the script. Relationships between men and woman are unsolvable allegory poems. I read them over and over and never understand the meaning if I hold on to the wound. If I let the abrasion heal, I am still in love with them.


3 responses to “RUMINATING ON RELATIONSHIPS”

  1. Geezus Crimony to the max…..i get it…..what an incredible read…..truly as a poem in verse form, never meant to end, nor should it. This is by far, one that hits close to the old school thought process of expressionist enlightenment.

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  2. You are a better man than I stay lousy in relationships and hold onto no one.As Timothy Leary said about relationships…”when the call is over hang up the phone.” I did that on every involvement…..no ties…no,callbacks.. No old,pals…Oh well!!!!

    Sent from my iPad

    >

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  3. My head’s gonna explode And he says I’m charming I’m frickin frackin freaking out And he just keeps smiling Poise hell, he’s inert Apolitical nonjudgmental sunny sided optimist Get a life! It’s a dramatic world And he shows up with flowers?

    What am I gonna do with this guy.

    Dennis About differences in temperament, and how a little grace can lead to healing

    Sent from my iPhone

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