Off The Record

Tom Hanks’ Daughter Shares Disturbing Details About Her Early Life

Published on April 7, 2025

In her upcoming memoir, EA Hanks, the daughter of Tom Hanks, has revealed painful revelations about her early years.

Elizabeth Anne, also known as EA, the 68-year-old’s daughter, is preparing for the publication of her upcoming book, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road.

The memoir recounts Elizabeth’s 2019 six-month journey from Los Angeles to Palatka, Florida, along Interstate 10. She explores her family’s past in great detail along the way, particularly the turbulent history and legacy of her late mother, Susan Dillingham.

“The stories we tell about where we are from cannot be divided from the stories we tell about who we are,” she penned on Instagram.

The memoir reveals the darker aspects of her early years even though it mostly focuses on her travels and observations. The book will include honest and heartbreaking recollections of the 42-year-old’s childhood, which was spent away from the limelight of Hollywood.

“I am a kid from the first (non-famous) marriage,” EA penned in an excerpt published by PEOPLE. “My only memories of my parents in the same place at the same time are 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.”

At the age of 49, Dillingham passed away from lung cancer in 2002. EA was 19.

EA thinks her mother had bipolar disorder, even though she was never officially diagnosed.

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According to EA, she and her brother Colin moved in with their mother in Sacramento following their parents’ 1985 divorce, where they allegedly suffered from physical abuse and neglect.

From the age of five to 14, EA describes “years filled with confusion, violence, deprivation.” In one passage, she writes, “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 described a terrifying incident in which her father had to locate them after they vanished from school, demonstrating that the trauma didn’t end there.

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

In 1988, after divorcing Dillingham, the Forrest Gump star married actress Rita Wilson. Truman, 29, and Chet, 34, are their two sons together.

Hanks discussed his children’s wildly disparate upbringings in a 2019 interview with The New York Times.

“My son [Colin] was born when I was very young. As well as my daughter [Elizabeth],” he said. “We have this gestalt understanding because [Colin and Elizabeth] remember when their dad was just a guy trying to, you know, make the rent.”

“My other kids, they were born after I had established a beachhead in every way. And so their lives were just different,” he added.

Hanks discussed parenting in greater detail last year when he appeared on the On Purpose with Jay Shetty podcast.

“I made every mistake,” he said, cited by Daily Mail. “You know, you scar the kids somehow in the same exact way. And as they get older, you come back around and (say), ‘Hey, can I talk about what a knothead I was with you for all those years?’ And (they say), ‘Yeah, sure, dad. Yeah, I’ve been kind of waiting for this. Why don’t you unload.'”