Elizabeth Hanks has opened up about her troubled childhood in her new book, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, which details her complicated relationship with her mother, Samantha Lewes.
Elizabeth, who goes by E.A., shared how her mother’s 1985 separation from her father, Tom Hanks, led to years of neglect.
“I am a kid from the First Marriage,” she wrote in an excerpt shared with People.
“My only memories of my parents in the same place at the same time are [my brother] 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.”
The 42-year-old detailed how she has few early memories of growing up in Los Angeles with her father, as Samantha uprooted their lives and moved them to Sacramento after divorcing Tom.
The Castaway star met fellow actor Rita Wilson and married her in 1988, a year after his divorce from Samantha was finalized. They later welcomed sons Chet and Truman.
© Photo: Rex“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 five to 14, years filled with confusion, violence, deprivation, and love, I was a Sacramento girl,” E.A. explained.
“I lived in a white house with columns, a backyard with a pool, and a bedroom with pictures of horses plastered on every wall.”
Sadly, their lives changed when her mother’s mental health began to suffer. “The backyard became so full of dog [excrement] that you couldn’t walk around it, the house stank of smoke,” she recalled.
© Getty“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 then recounted the moment that everything changed for their family. “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 wrote.
© GettyShe added that her parents’ “custody arrangement basically switched” after that as she lived with her father, and only visited her mother “on the weekends and in the summer.”
Tom’s only daughter shared that she believed her mother had suffered from undiagnosed bipolar, with symptoms like paranoia and delusion marring her life.
© InstagramThey maintained a distant relationship, until E.A. got the call that no child ever wants to hear. “My senior year of high school, she called to say she was dying.”
Samantha passed away in 2002 after battling lung cancer at just 49 years old. She had married the veteran actor in 1978, a year after welcoming their son, Fargo star Colin Hanks. E.A. was born in 1982, and the couple officially separated in 1985 before finalizing their divorce in 1987.
For more about Tom’s family, see below…
