Tom Hanks’ Daughter E.A. Hanks Details Violent Childhood With Mom Susan Dillingham

Tom Hanks‘ daughter, E.A. Hanks, has recently opened up about her troubled childhood with her mother after their parents divorced.

What did E.A. Hanks say about her childhood?

Hanks’ details come courtesy of People, who recently shared an excerpt of Hanks’ upcoming book, The 10: A Memoir of Family And The Open Road. In it, Hanks shares some of her experiences from her childhood, including not really having any memories of her parents being together.

“I am a kid from the First (non-famous) Marriage,” writes Hanks. “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.”

Hanks is the daughter of legendary actor Tom Hanks and Sophie Dillingham (who went by Samantha Lewes at the time), Tom’s first wife. The pair met when they were both theater students at Sacramento State University in the ’70s. The pair had two children, E.A. (Elizabeth Anne), and Colin, her older brother. After marrying in 1980, the pair divorced in 1985, and Susan got primary custody of both children.

E.A. Hanks details living in Sacramento as a confusing time

Although Tom had visits with his children, E.A. says that one day, Susan moved the family from Los Angeles to Sacramento without telling anyone. She was never diagnosed, but E.A. believes her mother was bipolar, and recalled her ages 5-14 as being ones filled with “confusion, violence, deprivation, and love.”

“I was born in Burbank, but after my parents split up, my mother took my older brother and me to live in Sacramento,” Hanks writes. “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.”

Hanks’ excerpt goes on to detail how her mother would eventually become physically abusive to her, which would eventually lead to custody switching and E.A. living in Los Angeles.

“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,” wrote Hanks. “My custody arrangement basically switched — now I lived in L.A. and visited Sacramento on the weekends and in the summer. When I was 14, my mother and I drove across America along Interstate 10 to Florida, in a Winnebago that lumbered along the asphalt with a rolling gait that felt nautical.”