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.

MUST TO MOONLIGHT


 

MAXFIELD PARRISH

 

Now that you know I am leaving Santa Fe on an exploration of destination,  there you are again.  Igniting my flashbulbs for the seamless cinema-scope of Santa Fe, you are toggling behind me in the snow, as I plow, sweep and sprinkle salt, you are there when I am in the parade and choosing my characters to congregate, and make a party, and you are there when I wake up in the morning, to draw me out of the down comfort, sheets and pillows that bemoan me leaving, I want to get up and begin the day, because you are there, turning up the music, and opening the laptop to a new page, and the journal to a new entry, and my books that have punished me for not reading them. They are dusty and wrinkled from my sleepy attempts to find the water bottle and drink, and then the spills fall on them.  You are there when I am cleaning the stove and bathroom floors, a reminder to get on the floor and douse the tiles with love,  listen to music while I  vacuum, and end the day with my  shoes off and slouching in a comfy chair.   You are not dormant spirit, you are rising from the labyrinth of an imagined life and one that is moonlight.

MAXFIELD PARRISH

LouLou

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3 responses to “MUST TO MOONLIGHT”

  1. Hi Darlin– I can’t grasp this freedom yet. Late March I will go with a suitcase full of dreams
    and head up to Malibu to see Chantal-and then the search for a new nest. I need a bagel smear and
    some pickles from Nate n Als.

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