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Tom Hanks ’ daughter E.A. Hanks is sharing her mother's history with mental illness.
The 42-year-old reflected on her difficult childhood in her new memoir The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road , including the abuse she says she experienced while living with her mother Susan Dillingham —though she didn’t immediately recognize it as such. “When a friend asks me, ‘What was your mom like?’ I sometimes wish for an easier answer,” E.A.
wrote in the book, released April 8. “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.’” E.
A., whose full name is Elizabeth Anne Hanks , was raised primarily by her mother after her parents’ divorce in the 1980s, when the actress abruptly moved her family to Sacramento without telling Tom. However, E.
A. said it wasn’t until later in life that she was able to pinpoint what Susan, who died of bone cancer in 2002, was dealing with. “Saying that my mother was mentally ill,” E.
A. explained, “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. said she realized when she was about 14 years old that something was “not right” in her home. “That there should have been more food in the house on a regular basis,” she wrote, “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.
” In one instance, she described her mom as being quick to anger even in public settings. “I tugged on my mom’s sleeve to move her out of the way,” she recalled, “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.” Elsewhere in the memoir, E.
A. detailed a confrontation between her and her mother, which ultimately brought her closer with her brother Colin Hanks . (Tom also shares sons Chet Hanks and Truman Hanks with wife Rita Wilson .
) “He turned to me. ‘So. Last night was rough,’” she recalled of the day after the altercation.
“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, she made her father aware of the physical abuse, which kickstarted the process of reversing the custody arrangement. "I told him," E.A.
recounted, "I didn't want to go home." E! News has reached out to Tom’s rep for comment on E.A.
’s memoir but has not heard back. The Oscar winner previously looked back on his divorce in 2020, characterizing it as a “horribly painful time.” “I couldn't be a worse father and I couldn't be a worse human being,” he said on In Depth with Graham Bensinger 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.”.
