Tom Hanks breaks his silence on his daughter's bombshell memoir detailing her disturbing childhood

Daily Mail​

04-06-2025

has broken his silence on his daughter's new bombshell memoir detailing her troubled childhood.
The actor, 68, opened up about the book, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, written by his only daughter E.A. Hanks, during a red carpet premiere for his new film 'The Phoenician Scheme' on Thursday.
Hanks praised her for being so candid about a dark time in her life and also noted he was not at all shocked that she had the strength to do so.
'I'm not surprised that my daughter had the wherewithal as well as the curiosity... in order to examine this thing that I think she was incredibly honest about,' the Toy Story star told Access Hollywood.
He went on to say that his daughter has been 'very open about what the process is' in regard to the book.
The popular memoir was released in April and examines the 42-year-old writer's life growing up with two Hollywood icons, Hank and her mother, the late actress Samantha Lewes.
E.A. spent the first five years of her life living in Los Angeles with both her mom and dad until they divorced in 1987.
In the book, she recalled how her mother chose to move her older brother Colin, now 47, and her from Los Angeles to Sacramento without warning.
She also revealed how Samantha's 'emotional and physical violence' brought her back to live with her father.
In an excerpt shared with People, she recalled: '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.
'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. then went on to detail the extent of her mother's actions toward her, adding: '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.
In the book, she recalled her how her mother chose to move her older brother Colin, now 47, and her from Los Angeles to Sacramento without warning and how Samantha's 'emotional and physical violence' brought her back to live with her father
'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 the memoir, E.A. shared that she believes her mother, who was never diagnosed, struggled with bipolar disorder with episodes of 'extreme paranoia and delusion.'
'My senior year of high school, she called to say she was dying,' she continued.
Samantha, who was known for her role in the 1984 movie Mr. Success, died in 2002 from bone cancer at age of 50.
In the wake of her passing, E.A. set out on a six-month road trip to try to piece together a portrait of her mother.
Crucial to the mystery was one of her mother's journal entries in which she claimed she saw E.A.'s late grandfather, John Raymond Dillingham, 'rape, murder, and cannibalize a little girl.'
'It wasn't a journal with dates,' she told People, '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. The crime she describes is witnessing her father rape, murder and cannibalize a little girl.'
If any of what Samantha was describing was true, E.A. added, her mother 'never stood a chance' - referring to the mental anguish she suffered toward the end of her life.
She wrote that she doesn't have too many memories of her parents - who wed in 1979.
The Forrest Gump actor met his first wife - who was four years his senior - when they were both studying theater at California State University in Sacramento.
They formed a friendship that quickly turned into more, as Tom and Samantha embarked on a whirlwind romance that led to the birth of their first child together - son Colin - out of wedlock in 1977.
Tom, 22 at the time, was struggling to get his acting career off the ground when he, Samantha, and Colin moved into a cockroach-infested apartment in Manhattan in 1978.
Samantha and Tom finally tied the knot the following year and Elizabeth was born in 1982.
By then, their marriage had already begun crumbling as Tom's career was taking off and he began booking acting jobs that kept him away from his wife and children for longer and longer periods of time.
He was still married to Samantha when Rita guest-starred in one episode of Tom's cross-dressing ABC sitcom Bosom Buddies back in 1981.
When they reconnected while filming the 1985 film Volunteers, neither Tom nor Rita could deny their feelings for each other.
'Rita and I just looked at each other and - kaboing - that was that,' the 68-year-old actor said during an appearance on the BBC's Desert Island Discs in 2016. 'I asked Rita if it was the real thing for her, and it just couldn't be denied.'
Hanks legally separated from his first wife in 1985 before their seven-year marriage ended in divorce two years later.
He then married Wilson, 68, in 1988. The couple of 36 years share two children together, Chet, 34, and Truman, 29.