The daughter of iconic actor Tom Hanks is opening up about her rocky childhood with her late mother and Hanks’ first wife, who she believes was bipolar.
E.A. Hanks, now 42, has spent the last several years researching her mother Susan Dillingham, who died from lung cancer in 2002 at only 49.
E.A. Hanks details in her new memoir how Dillingham struggled with her mental health and exhibited extreme paranoia and delusion, although she was never officially diagnosed.
Her parents fell in love at Sacramento State University in the mid-70s when they were young theater students and went on to have two children: E.A. (Elizabeth Anne) and her older brother, actor Colin Hanks.
The pair divorced in 1985 after only five years of marriage. E.A. was only a toddler at the time, and she has few memories of her early days in Los Angeles. Her mother got primary custody and she and her brother were only permitted to visit their father on the weekends and in the summer.
But one day, Dillingham (who went by the stage name Samantha Lewes early in her career) moved the children without notice from Los Angeles to Sacramento.
“My dad came to pick us up from school and we’re not there,” Hanks recalled. “And it turns out we haven’t been there for two weeks and he has to track us down.”
Hanks’ book, which comes out April 8, reveals her mother’s secretive past and her tumultuous childhood long before her father catapulted to stardom. The 10: A Memoir of Family And The Open Road recounts the six-month road trip she took in 2019 to retrace her mother’s footsteps. She traveled from L.A. to Palatka, Florida, where her mother’s family once lived.
One of Hanks’ most notable memories of her mother was when she drove with her from California to Florida. “In the years since, my mother died, and all the questions I had for her—where was she born, how was she raised, what happened to her that set her life on such a disturbed and volatile path—gathered dust,” she wrote in an Instagram post about the book.
Hanks’ journey in her minivan “Minnie” covered the route of the same road trip she took with her mom at only 14. She follows her mother’s diaries along the route, uncovering the mysteries of her mother’s past to better understand her own present.
“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 writes in the book. “I have one picture of me standing between my parents. In it, my mother’s best wig is slightly askew.”
Hanks said that ages five to 14 were “filled with confusion, violence, deprivation, and love.” Her mother likely faced serious mental illness.
“As the years went on, the backyard became so full of dog s--- that you couldn’t walk around it, the house stank of smoke,” she wrote. “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, everything changed when “emotional violence became physical violence.” Hanks was forced to move back to Los Angeles in the middle of seventh grade. Her custody arrangement completely switched around and she only visited her mother every so often.
“My senior year of high school, she called to say she was dying,” she wrote.
