Tom Hanks’ only daughter, E.A. Hanks, remembers a complicated childhood marred by her parents’ divorce and a mother she claims could be emotionally and physically “violent.”
E.A., whose initials stand for Elizabeth Anne, wrote about her experience in her upcoming memoir, “The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road.” The 42-year-old’s parents separated after five years of marriage in 1985, and her mother, Susan Dillingham, whom she describes as Hanks’ first “non-famous” wife, got primary custody.
The “Big” actor saw E.A. and her older brother Colin Hanks, 47, on weekends and in the summer, she wrote in an excerpt obtained by People magazine.
E.A. said she was born in the Los Angeles area, but her mother moved them to Sacramento after the separation.
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“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,” she wrote. “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 said Dillingham, who also went by the stage name Samantha Lewes, failed to tell their father she was leaving LA with the children.
“My dad came to pick us up from school, and we’re not there,” E.A. explained, according to People. “And it turns out we haven’t been there for two weeks, and he has to track us down.”
In Sacramento, E.A. and Colin’s life with Dillingham was troubled.
“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, adding she believes her mother, although undiagnosed, suffered from bipolar disorder and episodes of extreme paranoia and delusions.
“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.”
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Then Hanks suddenly got primary custody after an incident.
“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,” she wrote. “My custody arrangement basically switched — now I lived in L.A. and visited Sacramento on the weekends and in the summer.”
E.A. added that, in her senior year of high school, her mother “called to say she was dying.”
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Dillingham died of lung cancer in 2002 at the age of 49.
The memoir is mainly focused on a road trip she took in 2019 from LA to Palatka, Florida, where Dillingham’s family used to live to try and learn more about her mother. It was inspired by a different road trip she and her mom took together.
“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 of one of her last memories of Dillingham.
She said the only time she remembers her parents being “in the same place at the same time” was at Colin’s and her high school graduations.
“I have one picture of me standing between my parents,” she wrote. “In it, my mother’s best wig is slightly askew.”
Fox News Digital reached out to reps for Hanks for comment.
After his divorce from Dillingham in 1987, Hanks married Rita Wilson in 1988. They share two sons — Chet, 34, and Truman, 29.
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E.A.’s memoir, “The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road,” is out Tuesday.
