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E.A. Hanks, the daughter of actor Tom Hanks and his first wife Susan Dillingham, has revealed shocking details about her childhood, which she says was filled with “violence” and “deprivation.”
Short for Elizabeth Anne, E.A. opened up about her turbulent early years in her upcoming book, “The 10: A Memoir of Family And The Open Road.”
An account of the six-month road trip she took in 2019 on Interstate 10, from Los Angeles to Palatka, Florida, where her mom used to live, “The 10” follows E.A. as she seeks to know more about her late mother’s complicated and troubled life.
Dillingham, an actress who went by the stage name Samantha Lewes at the start of her career, died in 2002 from lung cancer at the age of 49. As her now 42-year-old daughter claimed in “The 10,” Dillingham physically abused E.A. and neglected her and her brother, Colin Hanks.
“I am a kid from the First (non-famous) Marriage. My only memories of my parents in the same place at the same time are Colin’s high school graduation, then my high school graduation,” she wrote in an excerpt published by People. “I have one picture of me standing between my parents. In it, my mother’s best wig is slightly askew.”
After she and Hanks separated in 1985, Dillingham took her and Colin to live in Sacramento, where she and the “Forrest Gump” star originally met as theater students.
“I have few memories of the early years in Los Angeles,” E.A. continued, noting that after Dillingham and Hank officially divorced in 1987, she and Colin would visit her dad, her stepmother (Rita Wilson) and her younger half brothers (Chet and Truman) “on the weekends and during summers.” But from the time she was 5 until she was 14, E.A. was a “Sacramento” girl who experienced “years filled with confusion, violence, deprivation” but also “love.”
“I lived in a white house with columns, a backyard with a pool, and a bedroom with pictures of horses plastered on every wall,” she remembered.
However, E.A.’s life grew darker “as the years went on.” The family’s backyard “became so full of dog s— that you couldn’t walk around it” and “the house stank of smoke,” she recalled.
“The fridge was bare or full of expired food more often than not, and my mother spent more and more time in her big four-poster bed, poring over the Bible,” the Vassar College graduate added.
“One night, her emotional violence became physical violence, and in the aftermath I moved to Los Angeles, right smack in the middle of the seventh grade.”
After that, her “custody arrangement basically switched.” E.A. and Colin moved to LA “and visited Sacramento on the weekends and in the summer.”
The transcontinental journey she would take in 2019 was inspired by an earlier trip with her mother along the same route.
“When I was 14, my mother and I drove across America along Interstate 10 to Florida, in a Winnebago that lumbered along the asphalt with a rolling gait that felt nautical,” she wrote.
It was during her senior year of high school that Dillingham “called to say she was dying.”
Dillingham and Hanks wed in 1978, one year after their son Colin was born, before separating in 1985 and finalizing their divorce in 1988. While the mother of two never remarried, Hanks went on to tie the knot with Wilson, 68, in 1988.
“The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road” by E.A. Hanks is out April 8.
English (US)