Tom Hanks' Rarely-Seen Daughter Opens Up About Childhood Filled With 'Confusion'

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While growing up as the child of a celebrity comes with its own unique set of challenges, it seems that Tom Hanks' only daughter's childhood was mostly complicated by her relationship with her non-famous mother.

E.A. Hanks, the 42-year-old daughter of Hanks and his first wife, Susan Dillingham, explores her oftentimes turbulent upbringing in her new book, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road (due in stores on Tuesday, April 8).

As People reported, Tom and Susan met as theatre students at Sacramento State University in the 1970s and went on to have two children: E.A. (Elizabeth Anne) and Colin, 47. They divorced in 1985 after five years of marriage, at which point Susan got primary custody, with the children visiting Tom on the weekends and over the summers.

However, that arrangement changed after a disturbing incident with Susan, as E.A. explains in her book. (While she was never diagnosed, E.A. believes Susan was bipolar, suffering from episodes of extreme paranoia and delusion.)

"I am a kid from the First (non-famous) Marriage," E.A. writes in an excerpt shared with 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."

"I was born in Burbank, but after my parents split up, my mother took my older brother and me to live in Sacramento," she continues. "I have few memories of the early years in Los Angeles. 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, but from 5 to 14, years filled with confusion, violence, deprivation, and love, I was a Sacramento girl. I lived in a white house with columns, a backyard with a pool, and a bedroom with pictures of horses plastered on every wall."

Unfortunately, her mother's condition would eventually get worse.

"As the years went on, the backyard became so full of dog s--t that you couldn’t walk around it, the house stank of smoke," E.A. writes.

"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, and in the aftermath I moved to Los Angeles, right smack in the middle of the seventh grade. My custody arrangement basically switched — now I lived in L.A. and visited Sacramento on the weekends and in the summer. When I was 14, my mother and I drove across America along Interstate 10 to Florida, in a Winnebago that lumbered along the asphalt with a rolling gait that felt nautical. My senior year of high school, she called to say she was dying."

Susan died from lung cancer in 2002 at the age of 49.

In addition to E.A. and Colin, Tom shares sons Chet, 34, and Truman, 29, with wife Rita Wilson.

The 10: A Memoir of Family And The Open Road tells the story of E.A.'s six-month long road trip on Interstate 10 on a quest for answers about her mother's past.