Tom Hanks speaks out on daughter E.A. Hanks' 'bold' memoir of mom's alleged abuse

USA Today

05-06-2025

Tom Hanks speaks out on daughter E.A. Hanks' 'bold' memoir of mom's alleged abuse
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Tom Hanks' daughter reveals childhood of 'violence' and 'deprivation'
Elizabeth Ann Hanks opened up about her turbulent early years which she says were filled with "violence" and "deprivation" in her upcoming book, The 10: A Memoir of Family and The Open Road.
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Tom Hanks is opening up publicly about his daughter's book.
The "You've Got Mail" actor said daughter E.A. Hanks' memoir is "a pride" because she's been "very open" about it. In "The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road," she looks back on her childhood and parents' divorce, alleging abuse perpetrated by her late mother (and Hanks' first wife), Susan Dillingham.
"She's a knockout, always has been," Hanks told Access Hollywood on the red carpet premiere of "The Phoenician Scheme."
The younger Hanks' memoir is wide-ranging, both a quest to understand her mother and a cross-country road trip. She writes about her time living in a van on her journey, political and sociological issues in the U.S. and the regional differences in the people she meets along the way. Hanks also tries to parse between fact and fiction in her family history, including a story about her maternal grandfather's possible connection to a murder.
Tom Hanks proud of daughter E.A. Hanks' 'bold' memoir
The "Forrest Gump" actor called his daughter a "bold, journalistic, literate mind," something he's known since she was young.
"If you've had kids, you realize that you see who they are when they're about six weeks old," Hanks said. He continued: "I'm not surprised that my daughter had the wherewithal as well as the curiosity, as well as, I'm going to say, perhaps, the shoot-herself-in-the-foot kind of wherewithal in order to examine this thing that I think she was very honest about. We all come from checkered, cracked lives, all of us."
Hanks and Dillingham, who acted under the name Samantha Lewes, divorced in 1987 after nine years of marriage. Together, they shared E.A. (born Elizabeth Anne) and Colin Hanks. He married actress Rita Wilson the following year. Dillingham died of lung cancer in 2002 at age 49 and had struggled with mental illness and addiction. Though her mother was never diagnosed, Hanks believes she was bipolar, she told People in an interview.
Her father gained primary custody in her early teen years, following a childhood living with her mother filled with "emotional" and "physical violence."
"As the years went on, the backyard became so full of dog (expletive) 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," Hanks writes. "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."
Hanks told People she was afraid to tell her dad how bad the situation became, calling herself a "protector" of her mom's secrets. Now Tom, a novelist and writer in his own right, is supportive of her memoir, she says: "I'm equally my father's daughter because he taught me to tell the truth and move forward."