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.

FAITHFULLY BELIEVE IN THE DEVINE.


Saturday, a blurry sky like fogged glasses, the temperature down to thirty, and all the counters cloroxed after a Pest control visit for a mouse in the kitchen OF my one hundred and thirty -five- year old home. Unabashed OCD about cleanliness; picture me with a broom, paper towels and, a bottle of Windex or bleach every other day. I am now tiptoeing into the kitchen in anticipation of a mouse and cooking with the vent on so they don’t smell the food. The servicer, Big Bill, like a door to a cathedral gave me all the tips on how to warn them off till they do the exclusions next week.

How I have changed, planning to watch the Daytona 500 tomorrow? Never have done that in my life. One news interview with a race car driver persuaded my senses to watch, they are athletes, of a kind, racing a car at over a TWO-hundred mile an hour next to twenty-something other competitors. I have not watched because of the accidents and deaths, not unlike horseraces, the end is not always celebratory, but I will watch because it’s a new experience.

This pop-up thought came to me; some people follow the direction of security and stability, I chose the direction of reinvention experience like, I knew more than what has been proven over centuries;  family, career consistency, saving for retirement, and moderation- which I never had. I also decided I am not going to wring my nerves into revulsion over where will I move? Not allowed to muse on that;  believe, have faith, and just concentrate on each day.

LouLou

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