Tom Hanks’ daughter, E.A. Hanks, short for Elizabeth Anne, has written a memoir about taking a road trip to connect with her mother’s family and learn more about her. The 42-year-old recently released an excerpt from her new book, “The 10: A Memoir of Family And The Open Road.”
The author talks about the difficult time she had growing up the daughter of Samantha Lewes, who she speculates had multiple mental disorders. Lewes (whose birth name is Susan Dillingham) and the “Forrest Gump” star were married from 1978 until 1987 after falling in love during college. E.A.’s older brother, Colin Hanks, is a Hollywood actor now.
“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,” she said in the book excerpt shared with People. “I have one picture of me standing between my parents. In it, my mother’s best wig is slightly askew.”
The author said she was “born in Burbank” but has “few memories of the early years in Los Angeles” because her mom moved them to Sacramento after divorcing Hanks.
“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 of visiting with Hanks’ current wife, Rita Wilson, who Hanks married in 1988.
“I lived in a white house with columns, a backyard with a pool, and a bedroom with pictures of horses plastered on every wall,” E.A. added.
The author recalled that “as the years went on,” her mother’s mental health began to decline.
“The backyard became so full of dog sh** 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,” she continued in the excerpt.
“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,” E.A. wrote. She said the custody arrangement changed after that, and then, during her senior year of high school, her mom “called to say she was dying.”
Lewes died from lung cancer in 2002 at age 49 when E.A. was 19. E.A. told People she believed her mother had undiagnosed bipolar disorder with episodes of extreme paranoia and delusion.
