Tom Hanks’ Daughter E.A. Hanks Says Her Childhood Was Filled With ‘Violence’

Tom Hanks’ daughter is opening up about the “confusion, violence, deprivation, and love” she experienced as a child.

E.A. Hanks (short for Elizabeth Anne Hanks) claims her late mother, Hanks’ ex-wife Susan Dillingham, was abusive following the couple’s divorce in the ’80s in her new book, The 10: A Memoir of Family And The Open Road, out Tuesday.

In an excerpt of the book obtained by PEOPLE, E.A. says things took a dark turn with her mother (who went by the stage name Samatha Lewes at one point) after she obtained primary custody of E.A., now 42, and her brother Colin Hanks, now 47, and moved them from Los Angeles to Sacramento without telling their father.

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

“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,” she continued, referring to the Oscar-winning actor’s wife Rita Wilson and their sons — Chet Hanks, 34, and Truman Hanks, 29. But from age 5 to 14, years she described as “filled with confusion, violence, deprivation, and love,” E.A. described herself as “a Sacramento girl.”

Moving from a “white house with columns, a backyard with a pool, and a bedroom with pictures of horses plastered on every wall” into a home that “stank of smoke” was quite the adjustment for E.A., who says she now believes her mother had undiagnosed bipolar disorder.

“As the years went on, the backyard became so full of dog s—t that you couldn’t walk around it,” she recalled. “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.”

E.A. lived with her mother until the middle of seventh grade, when the custody arrangement was amended and allowed her to move to Los Angeles with her father. During her senior year of high school, E.A. says her mother called her to tell her she was dying. Dillingham died in 2002 at age 49 after a battle with bone cancer.

The Forrest Gump star has rarely spoken of his divorce from Dillingham, calling it only a “horribly painful time” during a 2020 interview on In Depth with Graham Bensinger. “I couldn’t be a worse father and I couldn’t be a worse human being,” he said at the time. “I think the job as a parent, one of the things I’ve learned, is to try to guarantee a carefree life for your children for as long as possible. They should not be burdened with the cares of the world until they can handle them.”