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.
EDITING LIFE
There are reasons to quit and more reasons not to. The one reason that hovers above all is that everything we do in life needs revision. We are never through evolving into more thoughtful, loving, or wise human beings. Every day there is an opportunity to revise your valor and conviction.
Revising the position you sit, walk, talk, judge, form opinions, contribute to your home, friends, partners, and discovering what you’ve learned, dreamed, and mastered, is your novel. How to write a chapter when you feel caught; trapped by decisions that are outdated. Antiquities of a former persona.
Changes in life are like photographic images. Looking at old photographs and what I see is someone else. Some are recalled with approval and others are works that led me astray. I’m not alone. Life is a runaway that we have to catch for ourselves.
The puzzle is how to live, where to live, and for whom. It is the same with manuscripts; they improve with each revision.
You’re right. Self-examination and therefore self-revision is a never ending process. With a manuscript, however, it seems to me that, sooner or later, it probably does have an end…
Well said! My editing skills took a massive leap forward when I finally bit the bullet and forced myself to admit that any given book I write will REQUIRE several thorough edits to be acceptably similar to my vision for it, and for maximum reader enjoyment–and then made the appropriate adjustments in my writing life to accommodate this reality.
I’m currently STEEPED in the final edits on my newest book, a memoir called REBEL HELL: DISABLED VEGAN GOES TO PRISON. It’s hellacious–but the final product will reflect the staggering amount of work that went into it =)
3 responses to “EDITING LIFE”
You’re right. Self-examination and therefore self-revision is a never ending process. With a manuscript, however, it seems to me that, sooner or later, it probably does have an end…
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A great post and well written. Very catchy phrase this Antiquities of a former persona.
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Well said! My editing skills took a massive leap forward when I finally bit the bullet and forced myself to admit that any given book I write will REQUIRE several thorough edits to be acceptably similar to my vision for it, and for maximum reader enjoyment–and then made the appropriate adjustments in my writing life to accommodate this reality.
I’m currently STEEPED in the final edits on my newest book, a memoir called REBEL HELL: DISABLED VEGAN GOES TO PRISON. It’s hellacious–but the final product will reflect the staggering amount of work that went into it =)
~Love & Liberation~
Jan Smitowicz
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