E.A. Hanks, the daughter of Tom Hanks and his first wife, Samantha Lewes, is still struggling with the aftereffects of her “abusive” childhood.
The 42-year-old writes in her forthcoming memoir, “The 10,” that “personal hygiene” is difficult for her to grasp “because only sporadically did I ever have an adult telling me to brush my teeth, for example, let alone how or why I should.”
E.A. admits she was well into her 30s when she realized she had not seen a dentist in more than a decade.
The former Vanity Fair scribe also struggles to “keep food in my house on a consistent basis,” as it was either feast or famine at her mom’s home.
Additionally, E.A. shares that she developed excoriation disorder, which the Cleveland Clinic describes as a mental health condition that causes a person to compulsively pick at their skin.
“I still pick badly,” she writes, “though I work hard not to.”
The writer, born Elizabeth Ann Hanks, details her unstable upbringing with her late mother throughout “The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road,” which hits bookstores April 8.
Lewes, whose real name was Susan Dillingham, died from cancer in 2002 at age 49.
E.A. writes that her mom did not hit her but was abusive in other ways.
“She pushed me, shook me, pulled at my hair and locked me in a closet once or twice … she told me there were men hiding in her closet who were waiting for us to go to sleep to come out and do horrible things,” she remembers.
The Hollywood scion also claims Lewes would talk of “dozens of miscarried babies, [E.A.’s] lost siblings,” and insinuate she would “join them in eternal limbo.”
However, she also notes that her mother, who struggled with her mental health, drove her “all over California to horse shows at ungodly hours” and would “cut up cookie dough for my friends sleeping over and let me dye my hair every color I wanted.”
When E.A. was 14, her mom’s health took a turn for the worse, leading her to realize “there should have been more food in the house on a regular basis” and that being awoken in the middle of the night to hear “an impromptu lecture on why yoga was the devil’s work” was not the norm.
The teen ultimately moved to live with her father and his second wife, Rita Wilson, and her two half-brothers, Chet and Truman Hanks.
E.A. believes her mother had undiagnosed bipolar disorder with episodes of extreme paranoia and delusion.
Lewes met Tom, now 68, in the mid-’70s while they were both studying theater in Sacramento.
The then-couple welcomed their first child, son Colin Hanks, in 1977 and married two months later. They became parents of two in 1982 when E.A. was born.
The “Forrest Gump” star and Lewes separated in 1985 and divorced two years later.
She got primary custody, with the kids visiting their dad on weekends and in the summer — until the situation flipped in their teenage years.
While Lewes never remarried, Tom went on to wed Wilson, now 68, in 1988.
Read the full article here
