Tom Hanks’ daughter opens up about her turbulent childhood and complex relationship with her mum
in her upcoming memoir, Tom Hanks’ daughter has opened up about her turbulent childhood and complex relationship with her mother.
Tom Hanks’ daughter has opened up about her turbulent childhood and complex relationship with her mother.
Elizabeth Hanks, 42 – who Tom had with his first wife, Samantha Lewes – is publishing 'The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road', and uses the book to reflect on how her parents’ 1985 split shaped her and her brother Colin Hanks’ early years.
In an excerpt obtained by People, she wrote: “I am a kid from the First (non-famous) Marriage. My only memories of my parents in the same place at the same time are Colin’s high school graduation, then my high school graduation.
“I have one picture of me standing between my parents. In it, my mother’s best wig is slightly askew.”
Elizabeth, who now goes by E.A. Hanks, was born in Burbank but has “few memories of the early years in Los Angeles” because her mother moved them six hours away to Sacramento without warning shortly after the divorce.
She wrote: “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.”
She recalled living in “a white house with columns, a backyard with a pool, and a bedroom with pictures of horses plastered on every wall”.
However, as the years passed, she said her mother’s mental health deteriorated.
She said: “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.”
Elizabeth also described a turning point when “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.” After that, the custody arrangement reversed, with Elizabeth living primarily with Tom and visiting Sacramento on weekends and in the summer.
Tom’s ex Samantha, whose real name was Susan Dillingham, died of lung cancer in 2002 at the age of 49. Elizabeth was 19 at the time.
Samantha met Tom, now 68, in the mid-1970s while they were both studying theatre in Sacramento. They had their first child, Colin, now 47, in 1977 and married a year later.
Elizabeth was born in 1982, but the couple separated in 1985, finalising their divorce two years later.
Samantha was granted primary custody, with the children visiting Tom on designated weekends and summers until their teenage years, when Elizabeth moved in with him full-time. Samantha never remarried, while Tom wed actress Rita Wilson in 1988.
The couple share two sons, Chet Hanks, 34, and Truman Hanks, now 29.
‘The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road’' by E.A. Hanks is set for release on 8 April.
