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.

CHANGE IS COMING


Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich on Pexels.com

Some of us are not rushing to wave the I made it flag. Some favor holding back until the other elements of our character life are solid;  our fear, pettiness, falsity, greed, so many steps to climb. I have to trust in the pattern of our lives; the invisible thread that taunts us, teases us, and even torments us. I am discovering the shame and greed, the absolute indifference to my security, and finances.

Gravity has dropped, and so has my sense of structure, health, and self-discipline. Making a bed was too tedious, and grocery shopping was needless because I didn’t care about food; I like tuna sandwiches with avocado and bananas for breakfast. The comfort comes from writing, cloud watching, and phone calls with friends.   

The loss of direction and ambiguity lurking in the future is a place any person can find themselves in, especially those sensitive and artistic, without a map, familiar signs, and a plan. You have to ride it all the way to a new horizon.

It is a day later; the sky is unchanged, and the cloud cover is still nailed to the sky.  In random conversations, I have heard of people’s hardships, sacrifices, and compromises.  I tell myself not to be too sentimental , but it’s a useless force, I am sentiment. Don’t open those links to real estate values, how much money you need to retire. Open the link to redesign my interior life using new colors, textures, and backgrounds.


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