[Warning: Potentially Triggering Content]
This is such a rough chapter!
E.A. Hanks has a book coming out next week called The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road. The family in question is a rather famous one… but an incredibly dark story you probably never knew.
The author, also known as Elizabeth Hanks, is the daughter of Tom Hanks. But for a lot of her life she didn’t grow up with the beloved film star. Instead she was raised in Sacramento by her mother, Susan Dillingham, or as you may know her, ’80s actress Samantha Lewes. She got primary custody in the divorce, and Elizabeth and Colin didn’t see their increasingly famous dad much at first, especially when their mom moved them away without telling him.
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Tragically, as we learned in the first excerpt from The 10, Susan suffered from some mental health issues which meant E.A. and her brother Colin Hanks suffered abuse and neglect for a few years.
And now we have more details of from the book. E.A. writes about her mother’s treatment, per Page Six:
“She pushed me, shook me, pulled at my hair and locked me in a closet once or twice.”
Oof. But the majority of the punishment was psychological. She recalls in the memoir:
“[My mother] told me there were men hiding in her closet who were waiting for us to go to sleep to come out and do horrible things.”
Oh god… That poor girl. We can’t imagine trying to terrify our children that way!
She also remembers her mother telling them she’d had “dozens of miscarried babies” — her and Colin’s “lost siblings” — as she vaguely threatened them by saying they would “join them in eternal limbo.” JFC.
It wasn’t until she was 14 years old that she realized this wasn’t what everyone else was going through — that getting woken up in the middle of the night for “an impromptu lecture on why yoga was the devil’s work” wasn’t normal. To realize “there should have been more food in the house on a regular basis.” Their “fridge was bare or full of expired food more often than not,” she wrote.
We’re so sad to hear she and Colin went through this as kids. Thankfully they did eventually switch to spending more time with their dad. Sadly Susan died from cancer in 2002 — without resolving any of this with her daughter. That’s the point of the book, we guess — or at least the recreation of their mother-daughter road trip on Interstate 10. It sounds like a really emotional journey. You can experience it for yourself when the book hits stores on April 8.
[Image via EA Hanks/Instagram/MEGA/WENN.]
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