Wow, this memoir sounds amazing! Tom Hanks‘ daughter Elizabeth Hanks — who now goes by E.A. Hanks as a writer — has a real story to tell.
Her new book The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road is a reflection of a road trip she took with her mom when she was a kid, across the country from Los Angeles to Florida on Interstate 10. E.A. recreated the trip herself in 2019, some 17 years after her mother’s death, and wrote about the places she visited along the way, the people she met from the deserts of Arizona to the bayous of the Deep South.
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But she also wrote about the years growing up with her mother, actress Samantha Lewes — real name Susan Dillingham. Susan and Tom Hanks met when they were both theater students, long before the fame. They were married from 1980 to 1985, during which time they had E.A. and Colin Hanks. When they got divorced, mom got primary custody, with Tom getting visitation… until Susan moved them from LA to Sacramento without telling him! E.A. recalls:
“My dad came to pick us up from school and we’re not there. And it turns out we haven’t been there for two weeks and he has to track us down.”
In People‘s excerpt from The 10, published on Thursday, E.A. describes life after the divorce, a life not at all like what you might have thought the children of the most beloved movie star in the world experienced.
It was a life with a mother the author is now convinced had bipolar disorder, thanks to her bouts of “extreme paranoia and delusion.” She writes:
“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. I have one picture of me standing between my parents. In it, my mother’s best wig is slightly askew.”
Her mom died from lung cancer in 2002. As E.A. recalls, “My senior year of high school, she called to say she was dying.” Oof. But that’s getting ahead of things. Rewinding, she tells readers:
“I was born in Burbank, but after my parents split up, my mother took my older brother and me to live in Sacramento. I have few memories of the early years in Los Angeles. Eventually a divorce agreement was settled, and I would visit my dad and stepmother (and soon enough my younger half brothers) on the weekends and during summers, but from 5 to 14, years filled with confusion, violence, deprivation, and love, I was a Sacramento girl.”
“Confusion, violence, deprivation”…? Jeez. Yeah, it gets rough… She thinks back:
“I lived in a white house with columns, a backyard with a pool, and a bedroom with pictures of horses plastered on every wall. As the years went on, the backyard became so full of dog s**t that you couldn’t walk around it, the house stank of smoke. 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. 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.”
Oof. We’re so sorry and surprised to hear this story of abuse… But she didn’t stop seeing her mom entirely. It was after that they went on their mother-daughter odyssey across the country’s Bible belt. She remembers:
“My custody arrangement basically switched — now I lived in L.A. and visited Sacramento on the weekends and in the summer. 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.”
This sentence sets up the book’s premise, which she painted for potential readers beautifully a couple months back on her Instagram:
Sounds like a fascinating journey. Well, a few journeys really. You can read The 10 for yourself on April 8.
[Image via Joseph Marzullo/MEGA/WENN.]
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