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.

RELOCATION BEGINS WITH BOOKS


May 22, 2024

I read some older columns on singleness from times when I was alone and still friends with Dodger. Now, the pattern is unthreaded. There is no intertwinement of intimate conversations with a man, guidance, indulgences, or frolicking like children. When I see couples dining or walking hand in hand in the village, the vision snaps me into memories. The past lurks like a shadow, an overture to the present. Stream of consciousness, that translucence of mind that can drift like a leaf in the wind, is out of reach, so I don’t even attempt to reach for it. Acceptance of this interlude is permitted, as my mind is impregnated with a new canvas: relocation, standing in lines, driving the freeways, a city life that was once as natural to me as breathing feels like a complete revival. Employment, straightening my team playing skill set, working on deadlines, and finding excuses to get out of my chair away from the computer. Working in an art gallery is the only option besides being a remote writer.  

Today, as I attempt to make strategic, methodical decisions and edit my resume, the yellow line appears that separates the present from the future. Can I navigate a city confidentially, decisively, and with discipline? In the village, those skills sleepwalk effortlessly. I have a punishing skill for avoiding reality.

I have packed most of my books, vacillated on their importance several times to eliminate the load. I chose ten to give away, Last night on the phone with Jerry, I mentioned parting with my books.

“ Why are you keeping them? I assume you’ve read them.”

” No, I have a lot of photography books I’ haven’t opened once. “

“ So,  keep those.“

” I want all my favorite authors, some read, some not. I can’t let them go.– Don’t laugh, but they are my friends, in an abstract way, of course,” Jerry chuckled.

This morning, I kneeled and took another serious examination; no remains the answer. I’ve sold some of my favorite furnishings and artwork, so I made the strategic decision that my books are for keeps.

LouLou

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