Vanity Fair.
More than one person, surely, has looked at Tom Hanks and thought, “Oh yeah, Father’s Day is just around the corner, I better make sure to send a card.” His recent remarks about his actual daughter E.A. Hanks’ recent memoir, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, are peak sweet dad stuff, even while discussing the book’s sometimes difficult subject matter.
In the book, E.A., now 43, describes physical and emotional abuse from her mother, Samantha Lewes, after she and Tom divorced in 1987 shortly before she turned 5. After the split, Lewes got primary custody of E.A. and older brother Colin Hanks in Sacramento. In the book, E.A. describes her life from the ages of 5 to 14, when in the aftermath of emotional abuse turning physical and she moved to Los Angeles to live with her father, as “years filled with confusion, violence, deprivation, and love,” with a mother who had undiagnosed mental health issues and an ongoing struggle with addiction. Lewes died of cancer in 2002.
Tom was an early reader of his daughter’s memoir, he told Access Hollywood late last month on the red carpet of his latest film, The Phoenician Scheme, and was bursting with fatherly pride for his only daughter. (He has two more sons, Truman and Chet, with Rita Wilson, half-brothers to E.A. and Colin.)
“It’s a pride because she shares it with me, she’s very open about what the process is,” he said of his daughter’s writing, which she told Vanity Fair was inspired partly by reading her mother’s old diaries that she found in storage.
“She’s a knockout, always has been,” Tom said. “As a dad—if you’ve had kids, you realize that you see who they are when they’re about 6 weeks old. Their personality is there. Their temper, the way they see the world is demonstrated in their body language and on their face.”
And what he saw then holds true now, he said: “I’m not surprised that my daughter had the wherewithal as well as the curiosity as well as the—I’m gonna say perhaps the kind of shoot herself in the foot wherewithal—to examine this thing that I think she was incredibly honest about. One is that we all come from checkered, cracked lives, all of us.”
Both E.A. and her father point out that despite having what Tom calls a “copyrighted last name,” she knew struggle spending her childhood in her mother’s home, and what it felt like to be both inside and outside of the glow of the spotlight on her father as his public profile rose. E.A., a Vanity Fair and New York Times contributor, told VF in a recent interview that “I wasn’t born on third base, but we moved there in the ’90s. No matter how difficult my childhood with my mother was, the material reality is that I don’t have student loans. That’s how the privilege really does its magic: it sets you up with the right schools, the right jobs, the safety net. It opens all the doors, but the nuance is that it doesn’t keep them open.”
She described her father’s fame as somewhat “catastrophic” in its effect on her mother, who also acted but never found widespread recognition. “She felt that his stature in the world obliterated her and any chance she had at continuing her stage career,” she told VF. “The uncomfortable truth, and there’s a lot of them in this book, is she didn’t really have a career, and her ex-husband becoming the Tom Hanks was more insult to injury than significant impediment.”
Tom, who celebrated the book's April release with a ticketed publication day conversation with her at 92Y in New York City, praised his daughter for her embrace of these difficult nuances and examinations of privilege and jealousy, among other thorny issues that come with examining one’s family and childhood.
“She leans into everything of it, and I think that anybody who does that is a bold, journalistic, literate mind,” he said, “and I’m just thrilled that I can say this about my daughter.”
The admiration is mutual. As E.A. told VF, “From the outset, he has supported The 10. Whether it was swapping cars with me, helping me pick out camping gear, or being the first reader. The conversation we had once he had read a very early draft was exactly what I needed to hear, which was that I had depicted my mother accurately. This is what it was like to both love and fear her.”
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