E.A. Hanks will explore the mysteries of her mother’s past in her new book

The daughter of two-time Academy Award-winning actor Tom Hanks, E.A. Hanks, or Elizabeth Ann Hanks, wrote her first book that explores the mysteries of her mother, Susan Dillingham's past. Elizabeth, who is a writer, filmmaker, and now an author, has also been a staffer at Vanity Fair.

E.A. has also worked for some of the most prominent publications in America, including The New York Times, Huffington Post, TIME, and The Guardian. Elizabeth has titled her upcoming book The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, which is scheduled to be released on April 8, 2025.

The book narrates the story of her six-month-long 2019 road trip from Los Angeles to Palatka, Flo Rida, through Interstate 10. The city of Palatka was where her mother's family had once resided. The reason to visit the place was to learn about her mother, who, according to her, had a haunted past, yet she was a woman who loved reading Shakespeare and enjoyed poetry.

Susan Dillingham, commonly known by her stage name Samantha Lewes, was Tom Hanks' first wife, with whom he shared E.A. and son Colin. They were married from 1978 to 1987. After their divorce, Tom married Rita Wilson, his second wife, in April 1988 and shares two sons with her, Chet and Truman.

Elizabeth's mother suffered from lung cancer and passed away in 2002 at 49. Tom and Susan met each other when they were studying theatre at Sacramento State University and eventually fell in love in the mid-'70s. After both of them had divorced, Susan got the main custody of the children, and Tom visited them on designated weekends and made summer visits.

The troubled woman that Susan was, according to Elizabeth, she recalls the time when her mother moved them from LA to Sacramento without her father knowing about it. She remembered how her father, Tom, came to pick them up from school, but they weren't there until he tracked them down after a couple of weeks. However, Elizabeth believed that her mother was bipolar with episodes of paranoia and delusion, even though she was never officially diagnosed with it.

Elizabeth exclusively shared an excerpt from her upcoming book The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, with People. Check it out below.

"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."

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

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"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. 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. "

"My senior year of high school, she called to say she was dying."

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