Tom Hanks’ Daughter Opens Up About Childhood Filled With “Confusion, Violence, Deprivation”

Tom Hanks’ daughter, Elizabeth Ann Hanks, has opened up about her childhood in her new memoir.

Sharing troubled memories after her parents’ divorce in her upcoming book, Hanks reveals that her childhood was filled with “confusion, violence, deprivation.”

Tom Hanks’ daughter reveals a childhood filled with “confusion, violence, deprivation” in her new memoir

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Elizabeth, who goes by the pen name E.A. Hanks, is the daughter of Tom Hanks and his first wife, Samantha Lewes.

In her new book titled The 10: A Memoir of Family And The Open Road, Hanks opens up about her complicated relationship with her mother and the toll the couple’s divorce 40 years ago had on her and her older brother, Colin. 

In excerpts obtained by People, Hanks recalls in her memoir, “I would visit my dad and stepmother (and soon enough my younger half brothers) on the weekends and during summers …”

While E.A. Hanks was born in Los Angeles, her mother moved her children to Sacramento without informing the Forrest Gump actor

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While Elizabeth was “born in Burbank,” she has very “few memories of the early years in Los Angeles” because her mom moved them, out of the blue and without notice, six hours away to Sacramento shortly after her divorce from the Hollywood A-lister.

“My dad came to pick us up from school, and we’re not there,” recalls the writer. “And it turns out we haven’t been there for two weeks, and he has to track us down.”

Elizabeth writes that she was the “kid from the First (non-famous) Marriage”

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“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,” Hanks shared about her life as the daughter of a lesser-known Hanks before the Forrest Gumpactor tapped into global stardom.

“I have one picture of me standing between my parents. In it, my mother’s best wig is slightly askew.”

She shared that her time in Sacramento was tumultuous

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Sharing that her mother got primary custody of her kids after the divorce, Elizabeth writes, “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.”

“[F]rom 5 to 14, years filled with confusion, violence, deprivation, and love, I was a Sacramento girl,” she said.

Elizabeth believes that her mother had an undiagnosed bipolar disorder

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However, things took a dark turn “as the years went on.”

She writes that she believes her mother lived with undiagnosed bipolar disorder with episodes of extreme paranoia and delusion. 

“The backyard became so full of dog s**t 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,” she recalls in her book. 

After a physical incident, custody of Elizabeth and her brother was awarded to their father

 

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Elizabeth revealed that their custody was given back to her father following a physical incident.

“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,” she writes.

She adds that their “custody arrangement basically switched,” and after that point, she only visited Sacramento occasionally.

Samantha Lewes passed away in 2002 from lung cancer, leaving behind unanswered questions

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“My senior year of high school, she called to say she was d**ng,” Hanks recalls, describing how her mother broke the news of her terminal illness

Lewes, whose real name was Susan Dillingham, passed away from lung cancer in 2002 at the age of 49 when Elizabeth was just 19.

Her mother’s passing has left Elizabeth with many unanswered questions from her childhood.

“In the years since my mother died, and all the questions I had for her—where was she born, how was she raised, what happened to her that set her life on such a disturbed and volatile path—gathered dust,” she wrote on Instagram announcing the release of her new book on April 8.

Hanks went on the same road trip they once took with her mother to write her memoir

Cover of "The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road" by E.A. Hanks, featuring a rearview mirror and beads.

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Elizabeth writes in her memoir: “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.” 

In 2019, over six months, Elizabeth retraced the path from Los Angeles to Florida, where her mother once lived, hoping to make sense of their complicated past and capture the experience in her upcoming memoir, whose title references the Interstate 10 transcontinental highway.

Tom Hanks and Samantha Lewes divorced in 1985, and Hanks went on to marry his current wife, Rita Wilson, in 1988

 

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Samantha Lewes met the Cast Away actor, 68, in the mid-’70s while they were both studying theater at Sacramento State University.

The couple fell in love and welcomed their first child, son Colin, 47, in 1977 and tied the knot one year later. Their daughter, Elizabeth Ann, was born in 1982. 

However, their happiness was cut short, and the couple separated in 1985. Their divorce was finalized two years later. 

While Lewes never remarried, Tom Hanks went on to marry actress Rita Wilson in 1988. They have been together ever since and share two sons together, Chet Hanks and Truman Hanks.

Online users commented on E.A. Hanks’s memoir, praising her for “being real”

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