In her new book, “The 10: A Memoir of Family And The Open Road,” Elizabeth Hanks, the daughter of Tom Hanks and Samantha Lewes, talked candidly about her difficult upbringing and complicated relationship with her mother.
The author, who now goes by E.A. for Elizabeth Anne, discussed how her parents’ 1985 divorce affected her and her brother Colin Hanks’ early years in an extract that People Thursday was able to obtain.
“The First (unfamous) Marriage is where I am a child. Colin’s high school graduation and my own high school graduation are the only times I can recall my parents being together at the same time,” she said. One of my photos shows me standing between my parents. My mother’s finest wig is a little crooked in it.
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The 42-year-old novelist was “born in Burbank,” but she has very few recollections of her early years in Los Angeles because her mother abruptly transferred them to Sacramento, six hours away, soon after she and the “Forrest Gump” star got divorced.
According to People, she wrote, “A divorce agreement was eventually reached, and I would spend weekends and summers with my dad and stepmother (and eventually my younger half brothers), but from 5 to 14, years full of confusion, violence, deprivation, and love, I was a Sacramento girl.”
“I had a white house with columns, a pool in the backyard, and a bedroom with horse pictures on every wall.”
But “as the years went on,” things changed, and her mother’s mental condition deteriorated.
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“The house smelled of smoke, and the backyard got so crowded with dogs that you couldn’t walk around it.” In the passage, she recalled, “My mother spent more and more time in her big four-poster bed, poring over the Bible, and the fridge was usually empty or full of expired food.”
“I moved to Los Angeles in the middle of the seventh grade after she turned her emotional violence into physical violence one night.”
The Vassar College alumnus claimed that following that, her parents’ “custody arrangement basically switched,” and she was only able to visit Sacramento “on the weekends and in the summer.”
“When I was fourteen years old, my mother and I took a Winnebago that lumbered along the asphalt with a rolling gait that felt nautical as we drove across America along Interstate 10 to Florida,” she added.
The passage concluded, “She called to say she was dying during my senior year of high school.”
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Lewes, whose actual name was Susan Dillingham, passed away at the age of 49 in 2002 due to lung cancer. At the time, E.A. was only 19 years old.
In 2019, E.A. took another six-month car trip via Interstate 10 from Los Angeles to Palatka, Florida, the former home of Lewes.
She embarked on the quest to discover more about her mother and chronicled her experiences in the forthcoming memoir.
E.A. informed People that she believed Lewes suffered from untreated bipolar disorder, which manifested as severe spells of hallucination and psychosis.
While studying theater in Sacramento in the mid-1970s, Lewes got to know the 68-year-old actor from “Cast Away.”
The couple were married a year after having their first child, a 47-year-old son named Colin, in 1977. When Elizabeth was born in 1982, they had two children.
But the couple’s happiness was short-lived, as they split up in 1985. Two years later, their divorce was formalized.
Before things changed when they were teenagers, Lewes was granted primary custody in the divorce, and the children had scheduled summer and weekend visits with their father.
Tom later married actress Rita Wilson in 1988, but Lewes never remarried. Truman, 29, and Chet, 34, are their shared sons.
E.A. Hanks’ book “The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road” will be out on April 8.
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