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Tom Hanks’ only daughter, Elizabeth Anne Hanks, who now goes by E.A. Hanks, is releasing a new book about her life titled The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road. In it, she discusses her childhood and life with her mother, the late actress Samantha Lewes.
In her memoir, E.A. Hanks discusses a childhood she says was “filled with confusion, violence, deprivation, and love” after her mom, whose real name was Susan Dillingham (Samantha Lewes was a stage name), received primary custody of her and her brother, actor Colin Hanks.
Speaking to People, E.A. Hanks shared how one day, without any notice to her dad, her mom moved her and her brother from Los Angeles to Sacramento. “My dad came to pick us up from school and we’re not there. And it turns out we haven’t been there for two weeks and he has to track us down,” she revealed.
In an excerpt from the book shared with People, E.A. Hanks describes a bit of that life in Sacramento with her mother, who died in 2002 from bone cancer. She also shared how and why she ended up back with her dad in Los Angeles.
“I was born in Burbank, but after my parents split up, my mother took my older brother and me to live in Sacramento,” she wrote. “I have few memories of the early years in Los Angeles. 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. I lived in a white house with columns, a backyard with a pool, and a bedroom with pictures of horses plastered on every wall.”
“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. 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, her emotional violence became physical violence, and in the aftermath I moved to Los Angeles, right smack in the middle of the seventh grade. My custody arrangement basically switched — now I lived in L.A. and visited Sacramento on the weekends and in the summer.”
In a 2019 interview with New York Times, Tom Hanks talked about some of the differences E.A. and Colin Hanks had growing up versus his kids with his current wife Rita Wilson, Chet and Truman.
“We have this gestalt understanding because [Elizabeth and Colin] remember when their dad was just a guy trying to, you know, make the rent,” he said. “My other kids, they were born after I had established a beachhead in every way. And so their lives were just different.”
E.A. Hanks’ memoir, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, comes out on April 8.