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.

LAST SWIM WITH THE THINKER


I love to swim; water has been my home since I was born.  I wrote the Thinker stories in  the water because I  know the water. It was an experimental impulse to write as I did.    I know when you break the surface;  reality is  indifferent.  Breaking barriers, in water, in love, in business,  is all the same.   I have to work up a mental sweat to write, to create a dinner, a concept.  Nothing is meaninglessness to me.  I want everything to matter.

After the Thinker left, I have had two weeks of suck time to reflect the alchemy of our relationship. I believe in examination of relationships. It is the key to understanding who we are, who we don’t want to be, who we wish to be.  I have ironed out the swimming with the Thinker. It is a bridge to my courage,  to know it is time to leave Santa Fe. If you have ever lived here, you know it is not  ‘ the land of enchantment’ , rather the land of entrapment.  I don’t know who coined the phrase; but it is as true as Los Angeles being the land 20140528_194204of movie stars.  You may not become a movie star, any more than you may  leave Santa Fe.   I chose the challenge of living here.   I discovered  the conflict of leaving,  and living it now as I write.  I know I came to Santa Fe to discover the underbelly. That is what the Thinker gave to me.

LouLou

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