E.A. Hanks, the daughter of actor Tom Hanks and his first spouse Susan Dillingham, has revealed surprising particulars about her childhood, which she says was full of “violence” and “deprivation.”
Quick for Elizabeth Anne, E.A. opened up about her turbulent early years in her upcoming ebook, “The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road.”
An account of the six-month street journey she took in 2019 on Interstate 10, from Los Angeles to Palatka, Florida, the place her mother used to stay, “The 10” follows E.A. as she seeks to know extra about her late mom’s difficult and troubled life.
Dillingham, an actress who glided by the stage title Samantha Lewes at first of her profession, died in 2002 from lung most cancers on the age of 49. As her now 42-year-old daughter claims in “The 10,” Dillingham bodily abused E.A. and uncared for 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 printed by Folks. “I have one picture of me standing between my parents. In it, my mother’s best wig is slightly askew.”
After Dillingham and Hanks separated in 1985, she took E.A. and Colin to stay in Sacramento, the place she and the “Forrest Gump” star initially met as theater college students.
“I have few memories of the early years in Los Angeles,” E.A. continued, noting that after Dillingham and Hanks formally divorced in 1987, she and Colin would go to her dad, her stepmother (Rita Wilson) and her youthful half brothers (Chet and Truman) “on the weekends and during summers.”
However from the time she was 5 till she was 14, E.A. was a “Sacramento” lady who skilled “years filled with confusion, violence, deprivation” but in addition “love,” she wrote within the ebook.
“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.
Nevertheless, E.A.’s life grew darker “as the years went on.” The household’s yard “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 School 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 soak up 2019 was impressed by an earlier journey together with her mom alongside the identical 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 throughout E.A.’s senior 12 months of highschool when Dillingham “called to say she was dying.”
Dillingham and Hanks bought married in 1978, one 12 months after Colin was born, and separated in 1985. Their divorce was finalized in 1987. Whereas the mom of two by no means remarried, Hanks went on to tie the knot with Wilson, 68, the next 12 months.
“The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road” by E.A. Hanks is out April 8.
