Tom Hanks’ Daughter Opens Up About 'Violence' In Her Childhood
Childhood can leave us with memories that last a lifetime, some comforting, others hard to shake. In her new memoir, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, Elizabeth Anne (E.A.) Hanks opens up about the darker side of her early years, challenging the picture-perfect image we often paint of celebrity families.
E.A. Hanks, now 42, is best known as the daughter of Oscar winner Tom Hanks and his first wife, Susan Dillingham. In her book, she describes a childhood marked by “confusion, violence, and deprivation,” starting not with her father’s fame but with the upheaval that followed her parents’ divorce in the mid‑1980s.
After Tom and Susan split, Susan won full custody of E.A. and her older brother, Colin, who’s now 47. Without warning, she packed up their lives in Los Angeles and moved the family to Sacramento. Elizabeth recalls how, one day, her father drove to pick them up from school, but they weren’t there. “It turns out we hadn’t been there for two weeks,” she writes. “He had to track us down.”
That moment set the tone for what would become years of neglect. Though weekend visits to their dad in Los Angeles offered brief relief, “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” - most days were spent back in Sacramento under her mother’s care.
Elizabeth Hanks says she endured years of abuse from her mother while growing up
E.A. paints a picture of a house that started out neat and inviting: “a white house with columns, a backyard with a pool, and a bedroom with pictures of horses plastered on every wall.” But it didn’t stay that way for long.
Over time, the backyard “became so full of dog s**t that you couldn’t walk around it,” she writes. Inside, the fridge was more often empty or stocked with expired food, and Susan retreated to her four‑poster bed, absorbed in her Bible.
Then the emotional neglect turned physical. “One night, her emotional violence became physical violence,” E.A. recalls without pulling punches. She doesn’t shy away from the details: the fear, the confusion, the sense that the mother she needed most was slipping further away.
E.A. stayed with her mom until seventh grade, after which she moved to Los Angeles full‑time, making only weekend and summer trips back to Sacramento. Even then, the shadow of her early years lingered. Susan later confided that she was battling bone cancer, a fight she ultimately lost in 2002, when Elizabeth was 19. She was just 49.
Getty ImagesWhat makes E.A.’s story stand out isn’t the celebrity connection; it’s the honesty. She doesn’t seek pity or sensationalize every detail.
Instead, she shares the raw moments: the sudden moves, the empty fridge, the backyard so overrun it became its own obstacle course. She lets us see how a child tries to make sense of a world that keeps shifting under her feet.
Through it all, there are small flashes of normalcy: a weekend at her dad’s, a summer by the pool in Los Angeles, the birth of half‑brothers who brought new life into the family. But those moments of light were always tinged with the memory of darker days.
Tom Hanks has rarely spoken publicly about his divorce.
Tom Hanks describes his divorce from Susan as “a horribly painful time,” and by reading between the lines of his daughter’s memoir, you can see why. The split didn’t just break up a marriage; it upended two children’s lives and left scars that lasted decades.
Getty ImagesBy the end of The 10, you’re left with a clear picture of how complicated family can be, and how resilience sometimes comes down to finding small islands of safety in the chaos. E.A. Hanks doesn’t pretend her childhood was anything other than what it was: messy, painful, and at times frightening.
But she also shows how, even in the toughest situations, people find ways to keep going. Her memoir isn’t an easy read, but it’s an important one and it offers a lesson: that speaking the truth, no matter how uncomfortable, can be a first step toward healing.
