Tom Hanks’ daughter, E.A. Hanks, is opening up about the trauma she experienced during her childhood and the complex relationship she had with her late mother, Susan Dillingham. In her new memoir, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, released April 8, the 42-year-old candidly reflects on what she now believes was her mother’s undiagnosed mental illness and the abuse she endured as a child.
“When a friend asks me, ‘What was your mom like?’ I sometimes wish for an easier answer,” E.A. writes. “It’s an uncomfortable truth that if she’d regularly hit me, I could say, ‘She was abusive,’ and everyone, as the lyrics of one of her favorite records put it, ‘would know exactly what I was talking about.’”
Born Elizabeth Anne Hanks, E.A. was primarily raised by her mother following her parents’ divorce in the 1980s. She recalls how Susan abruptly moved the family to Sacramento without informing Tom Hanks, her father. At the time, the true nature of what she was living through wasn’t clear to her.
“Saying that my mother was mentally ill,” she explains, “that she was possibly ‘bipolar with episodes of extreme paranoia and delusion,’ makes sense of the nights sitting with her on a blanket in the driveway, my mother sobbing and convinced there were men inside the house, bugging the walls, waiting for us in our bedrooms.”
E.A. says she first realized that something was deeply wrong in her home around the age of 14.
“That there should have been more food in the house on a regular basis,” she recalls, “that I should have had help with homework, that I needed clean clothes, and that being woken up at three in the morning to hear an impromptu lecture on why yoga was the devil’s work did not happen in other houses.”
The memoir recounts several instances of erratic and abusive behavior from her mother, including an incident in public where Susan lashed out unexpectedly.
“I tugged on my mom’s sleeve to move her out of the way,” she writes. “And like a provoked snake she hissed and grabbed at my forearm. She squeezed me hard enough that I made a noise, and she got very close to my face. I remember the other woman watching us, her worried expression. It was new for Mom to be this unsettled in public.”
One of the most pivotal moments in her story involves her brother, actor Colin Hanks, stepping in after a particularly intense confrontation with their mother.
“He turned to me. ‘So. Last night was rough,’” E.A. recalls. “We compared what she had been yelling at us about. I think I started crying. I told him she had hit me. He asked me if I wanted to go home after school, and I said no. My brother told me he would take care of it. And he did, as he has always taken care of me.”
Later that day, E.A. informed her father about the abuse, a conversation that ultimately led to a reversal in the custody arrangement.
“I told him,” she writes, “I didn’t want to go home.”
E! News has reached out to Tom Hanks’ representative for comment on the memoir but has not yet received a response.
Tom Hanks has previously spoken about the painful time surrounding his divorce. In a 2020 appearance on In Depth with Graham Bensinger, he shared his own regrets.
“I couldn’t be a worse father and I couldn’t be a worse human being,” he said at the time. “I think the job as a parent, one of the things I’ve learned, is to try to guarantee a carefree life for your children for as long as possible. They should not be burdened with the cares of the world until they can handle them.”
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