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.
Her destiny arrived just past midnight
Next to a burning red candle
The wholeness of empty by her side
Insight living inside
Does not lay blame or cause pain
A spoonful of teenage reminiscence
I want to be alone
The foreshadowing future looms
In the twilight of a waxing gibbous moon.
This is not a “How to Recognize Gaslighting” or a “Step-by-Step Guide to Gaslighting.” This is a true story, drawn from my experience.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
In a Sunday silence, she hopscotches to a nuance in 2018 when a handsome man offered a hand of conversation.
He walked with her and stopped in front of a Spanish Colonial residence shrouded in exotic flora and fauna.
“ That’s where I live,” he said keenly.
“ How long have you lived there? she asked
“ Thirteen years. I am so grateful for my home.”
She silenced her thoughts, less thankful of her dome.
She once lived on a street
Of serenity and beauty
Her view was scoured with a sightlessness of New Mexican history
Unshaken by the homes regal display
To live without grateful when your basket is complete.
Is like living in blindness from head to foot.
This is not a “How to Recognize Gaslighting” or a “Step-by-Step Guide to Gaslighting.” This is a true story, drawn from my experience.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
He pushed her on a swing, so high she touched the sky, viewed the world through his eyes, lived for a time without lies, then as mystically he appeared, he let go of the swing, and she fell on her wing, broken but with the will to begin again. A broken heart hasn’t stopped her from loving him.
For ten days she stared unblinking, just thinking of her spoken words, how they made their way to his ears and returned the sounds she so wanted to hear. She wiped the tears as some people find love at the core of their fears. The strain of regaining her former spiraling spirit and beating heart may not come for months. She says to herself out loud, ‘it must, I must.’ As written, sung, painted, and performed for hundreds of years, love is undefinable as it is something supernatural.
This is not a “How to Recognize Gaslighting” or a “Step-by-Step Guide to Gaslighting.” This is a true story, drawn from my experience.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
Listening to Miles I imagine my pen moving on paper in straight lines and indentations. The beak of the pen breaks out of its shell and abstractions of thought spill. Without prior meditation, feelings form the thoughts. Emotion versus reasoning. Miles musical pen is all emotion. That’s Jazz music!
This is not a “How to Recognize Gaslighting” or a “Step-by-Step Guide to Gaslighting.” This is a true story, drawn from my experience.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
A NATIVE AMERICAN LIGHT SHOW.
YOU CAN BECOME WHO YOU DREAMED OF, DO WHAT YOU DREAMED OF IN SANTA FE , because Santa Feans do not care.
I heard this slogan a lot when I first moved here seven years ago. My understanding was vague, unrealized, and I didn’t think much about it until this winter. I began to approach strangers, walk across the street to the spa in a robe, or leave my pajama top under my sweater because I like the texture of it.
I’ve given up the diving board of scrutiny and plunge into the dreamy, stony, outdated, simplistic extravagance, and unrealistic vibe of Santa Fe.
I keep dreaming, and preparing, with a face blotched red by cold, that THE LIGHTS, SHADOWS, MOON AND CHARACTERS ARE MY BROADWAY FOR NOW. NOT FOREVER. EVERYTHING CAN BE TEMPORARY IF WE TAKE ADVENTURES IN LIVINGNESS.
This is not a “How to Recognize Gaslighting” or a “Step-by-Step Guide to Gaslighting.” This is a true story, drawn from my experience.
I’ve written in the genre of Creative Nonfiction, integrating the events through dialogue, journal entries, and a third-person narrative. Within three locations, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Los Angeles, California, and Saratoga Springs, NY. Greta (me) exposes the mutilation gaslighting abuse inflicts on her emotions, psychology, mental and physical health, and her finances.
