In a deeply personal memoir, Tom Hanks’ only daughter, E.A. Hanks, recently revealed some disturbing memories involving her childhood.
Among the shocking details are a grandfather who “cannibalize(d) a little girl,” and her youth that she said was “filled with confusion, violence, deprivation.”
Before Forrest Gump, Toy Story, and unforgettable Oscar wins, Tom Hanks was a struggling actor working side gigs and landing small roles on low budget films and TV shows.
While he was still chasing his Hollywood dreams, Hanks’ world revolved less around red carpets and more around diaper changes, late-night feedings, and being a present dad to the two children he shared with his first wife, Samantha Lewes (born Dilingham).
Hanks and Lewes, both theater students at Sacramento State University, married in 1978. The year before, Hanks had his first son, Golden Globe nominated actor Colin and in 1982, his only daughter Elizabeth Anne – known now as E.A. – joined the clan.
After divorcing Lewes in 1987, Hanks married Rita Wilson in 1988.
“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,” says E.A., whose mother was 49 when she died from bone cancer in 2002.
Cannibalized little girl
About 10 years after her mother died, E.A was sorting through some papers and found a red journal belonging to Lewes.
“It wasn’t a journal with dates, 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,” E.A., 42, told People.
The words were shocking: “The crime she describes is witnessing her father rape, murder and cannibalize a little girl.”
Road trip
In 2019, E.A. took a six-month road trip along the Interstate 10, from L.A. to Palatka, Florida, where her mother’s family once lived – the same path she traveled as a 14-year-old with Lewes.
In her new memoir “The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road,” E.A. invites fans to join her journey along the interstate as she looks for answers on her grandfather (died in 1981) and her troubled mom, who she suggests was bipolar but undiagnosed.
Sharing one unpredictable moment, the author shared that Lewes abruptly relocated the children from Los Angeles to Sacramento, a move that she says not only stunned her father but also marked the beginning of emotional and psychological struggles.
Emotional and physical violence
The sudden shift didn’t just uproot their lives; E.A. claims that when she was “5 to 14,” the years were “filled with confusion, violence, deprivation, and love.”
“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,” E.A. writes.
She then discusses the lack of belonging and emotional excavation of identity that she experienced due to her late mother’s mental instability.
“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. My custody arrangement basically switched – now I lived in L.A. and visited Sacramento on the weekends and in the summer.”
The last part of the excerpt shared by People says, “My senior year of high school, she called to say she was dying.”
‘Remain in the shadows’
As for her grandfather, John Dilingham, E.A. told People that “it’s entirely possible” that her mother “was describing was an obliteration of her own girlhood.”
“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,” E.A. suggested, adding “What I say in the book is to let him remain in the shadows.”
End of the journey
After she returned home from the road trip with 5,000 miles clocked on the van she borrowed from her father, E.A. said the journey was a “huge gift, which was just time to think about my mom.”
Expressing gratitude to her father she adds, “I’m equally my father’s daughter because he taught me to tell the truth and move forward.”
We can’t wait to read E.A. Hanks’ memoir! If you’ve picked it up and given it a read, please let us know what you think!
