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.

HOPSCOTCHING THE TRUTH


WHEN YOU TOUCH THE TRUTH: by thought, word of mouth, friend, or by a dream, however, it comes, and completely unexpectedly it is, the blessing is it came.  hopscotch-bristol-1050x700   When it is closure, to events and persons in those events, and if you examine your part, what you played, was it original or falsified, was it genuine, and was it worth it. Asking myself these questions, as  I bounced over to the Social Club to test my sociability.  I do resist introductions, loners are like that, tonight I was in a celebratory mood, and I wanted to be  like an octopus, my arms hanging out, ready to catch. t.     

Three days later:  The door is locked now, it will pop open now and then, in my interior rearview mirror. My secret can only be revealed after mounds of trust have been sifted and sealed. The former LouLou trusted, effortlessly, so the truth is I cannot behave that way anymore. Or can I? 

It is the most destabilizing force of emotion to accept I trusted someone who betrayed our thirty-five year Huckleberry Friend trust.  I don’t know how anyone else adapts to this.  I’m kinda staring out the window, like a cat staring at an unreachable mouse.  When I’m in this mood I listen to Bobby Darin and Tony Bennett, I’m a bleeding nostalgic.


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