2 days Ago By People
A decade after the death of her mom Susan Dillingham, E.A. Hanks began to sort through the belongings that had been put into storage.
Among the items she kept were a threadbare quilt from her childhood bed, a potato masher, a binder of poetry and a trove of "miscellaneous papers.” Within those papers, E.A.
(short for Elizabeth Anne) later found a red journal belonging to her mother, who was her father Tom Hanks ' first wife. “It wasn’t a journal with dates,” says the 42-year-old writer, “but more stream of consciousness, spurts of what would occur to her. And then I read her description of her father committing this horrible crime.
” The words were shocking beyond belief. Says E.A.
, “The crime she describes is witnessing her father rape, murder and cannibalize a little girl.” In 2019, 17 years after her mother’s death from lung cancer in 2002 at age 49, E.A.
set out to learn more about the troubled woman who struggled with mental illness and addiction and find out if there was a "grain of truth" in what she'd written about her maternal grandfather, John Raymond Dillingham, who died in 1981. In search of answers, she took to the road for six months in a van (borrowed from her dad) and drove across Interstate 10, from Los Angeles to Palatka, Florida, where her mother’s family had once lived. She shares her odyssey in her new book, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road .
“If any part of the red journal is true," she says, "where I read about my grandfather raping and murdering, then my mother never stood a chance.” Along the way, she hoped to learn more about the woman her father fell in love with when they were both acting students at Sacramento State University. "My dad was traumatized by his childhood and his family’s divorce and a revolving door of stepparents and -siblings," she says of Tom, now 68.
"The love that existed between my parents is two hurt kids trying to dig out of a well together." Related: Tom Hanks Explains How Coping with His Parents' Divorce as a Child 'Fueled' Him to Become an Actor After five years of marriage and two kids (E.A.
's older brother Colin is 47), Tom and Susan, who acted in small roles under the name Samantha Lewes, divorced in 1985. Susan had primary custody at first, with designated weekend and summer visits with Tom. But over time home life grew increasingly fraught, especially after Susan moved them to Sacramento without telling their dad.
There, Susan's mental health deteriorated. (Though her mom was never diagnosed, E.A.
believes she was bipolar with episodes of extreme paranoia and delusions.) By around age 10 or 11, she understood things were different at home, and it only got worse. “The screaming was scarier,” she says.
“The food was more inconsistent. The degree to which she would pray and speak to God out loud — she used to be able to keep it together in public. That went very quickly.
” By then, E.A. was hesitant to tell anyone, even her dad, who had married Rita Wilson , with whom he had two sons, Chet and Truman .
“Because I was so young, the truth is I wouldn't inform on my mom," says E.A. "I was her protector, the keeper of secrets.
” Related: Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson's Relationship Timeline Things came to a head just before she turned 14 when the abuse turned physical. Susan struck her in the face, which led to Tom gaining primary custody. Still, there were summer visits with her mom, and in 1996 Susan drove her daughter to Palatka, Florida, to visit relatives.
That was the first time E.A. saw a photo of her maternal grandfather, John Raymond Dillingham.
When she asked her mom "Is this your father?" she said "Yes," then left the room. That was the last E.A.
heard about her grandfather until she found the red journal and the shocking claims in it. On her 2019 road trip, she reached out to one of her uncles to learn more about her mom's childhood. His answers were intriguing but inconclusive.
As E.A. recalls, “He described a childhood where someone very easily could have fallen through the cracks,” she says.
“And the way he describes my mother is someone who is apart in some way and who’s been touched by something that she had no language for.” It made her wonder if Susan had been writing about herself. “It’s entirely possible that what she was describing was an obliteration of her own girlhood," says E.
A. "And that what she’s describing actually happened to her. That it felt like murder and being eaten up, and what she’s really describing is abuse at the hands of her father.
” Never miss a story — sign up for PEOPLE's free daily newsletter to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. Though she never solved the mystery of her grandfather, she says, “Even if I was able to prove conclusively what he did or didn’t do, it would not make my mother make any more sense." "If the premise of the book is who did it, the major takeaway of the book is that understanding him and what he did does not help me understand my mother.
What I say in the book is to let him remain in the shadows.” Still, by the time she pulled back into her driveway, 5,000 miles and one oil change later, she was grateful. “I’d given myself this huge gift, which was just time to think about my mom," she says.
In turn, she also received another gift in her father's unwavering support. As she says, “I’m equally my father’s daughter because he taught me to tell the truth and move forward.” The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road is out Tuesday, April 8, wherever books are sold .
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