Elizabeth Hanks, the daughter of Tom Hanks and the first wife Samantha Lewes, spoke of her turbulent childhood and her complex relationship with her mother in her new book, “The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road”.
In an extract obtained by people on Thursday, the author – who now goes by EA for Elizabeth Anne – wrote about how her parents separated in 1985 in 1985 and her first years from Brother Colin Hanks.
“I am a child from the first (not famous) marriage. My only memories of my parents in the same place at the same time are the graduation of Colin in high school, then my graduate of secondary studies, ”she started. “I have a photo of me standing between my parents. Inside, my mother’s best wig is slightly Askew. ”
The author, now aged 42, was “born in Burbank” but has very “few memories of the first years in Los Angeles” because his mother moved them, without warning, at a six o’clock in Sacramento shortly after his divorce of the star of “Forrest Gump”.
“Finally, a divorce agreement was settled, and I would visit my mother and my mother-in-law (and soon my youngest brothers) on weekends and during the summers, but from 5 to 14 years old, years filled with confusion, violence, deprivation and love, I was a daughter of Sacramento,” she wrote, by people.
“I lived in a white house with columns, a courtyard with a swimming pool and a bedroom with photos of horses coated on each wall.”
However, things have taken a turn “over the years” and the mental health of his mother has suffered.
“The backyard court has become so full of dogs – that you could not walk, the house track of smoke. The refrigerator was naked or full of food exposed most often, and my mother spent more and more time in her large four-friend bed, moving on the Bible, ”she recalls in extraction.
“One night, his emotional violence became physical violence, and following, I moved to Los Angeles, right in the middle of the seventh year.”
The graduate of the Vassar College said that “his parents’ childcare arrangement had fundamentally changed” after this point and that she did not find herself to visit that Sacramento “on weekends and in summer”.
“When I was 14, my mother and I crossed America along the Interstate 10 in Florida, in a Winnebago who was moving along the asphalt with an approach that seemed nautical,” she continued.
“My last year of high school, she called to say that she was dying,” finished the extract.
Lewes, whose real name was Susan Dillingham, died of lung cancer in 2002 at the age of 49. EA was only 19 years old at the time.
In 2019, EA did another six -month road trip from Los Angeles to Palatka, Florida, where Lewes used to live, via Interstate 10.
She started the trip to find out more about her mother and wrote the next memories on her experiences along the way.
EA told people that she suspected that Lewes lived with an unmatched bipolar disorder with episodes of extreme paranoia and illusion.
Lewes met the actor “Cast Away”, 68, in the mid -1970s while they were both studying from Sacramento.
The couple then welcomed their first child, his son Colin, 47, in 1977 and made the knot a year later. They became parents of two in 1982 at the birth of Elizabeth.
However, happiness was short -lived and the pair separated in 1985. Their divorce was finalized two years later.
Lewes obtained the main custody in the divorce and the children appointed weekend and summer visits with their father – until the situation turns into their adolescence.
While Lewes never remarried, Tom continued to marry actress Rita Wilson in 1988. They share the sons Chet, 34, and Truman, 29.
“The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road” by EA Hanks was released on April 8.
