Tom Hanks’ Daughter Recalls Harrowing Question She Asked Him About Her Childhood

Tom Hanks’ daughter, E.A. Hanks, is opening up about the childhood trauma she endured in her new memoir — a youth, she wrote, that was filled with “confusion, violence, deprivation, and love.” E.A., now 42, is the Forrest Gump actor’s only daughter, and his second child with his first wife, Susan Dillingham. Tom and Dillingham (whose […]

Apr 10, 2025 - 21:25

Tom Hanks’ Daughter Recalls Harrowing Question She Asked Him About Her Childhood

Tom Hanks’ daughter, E.A. Hanks, is opening up about the childhood trauma she endured in her new memoir — a youth, she wrote, that was filled with “confusion, violence, deprivation, and love.”

E.A., now 42, is the Forrest Gump actor’s only daughter, and his second child with his first wife, Susan Dillingham. Tom and Dillingham (whose stage name was Samantha Lewes), met as theater students at Sacramento State University in the 1970s, going on to tie the knot in 1978 — just several months after the birth of their eldest, son Colin Hanks. The pair welcomed E.A. in 1982 before going on to separate three years later. Tom and Dillingham divorced in 1987.

In her new book, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, E.A. recalls her devastating younger years with her mentally ill mother — who died from lung cancer in 2002 — and E.A. recreated, as an adult, a roadtrip she and Dillingham took as a teen. She also recalled a specific question she asked her Academy Award-winning father about her origin.

“I once asked my father if I was a ‘save the marriage’ baby,” E.A. wrote in her memoir, per E! News. “‘No,’ he assured me, ‘but you were a ‘someone died and I feel the urge to create life’ baby.'”

The person who passed, E.A. explained, was her mother’s father, John Raymond Dillingham.

“Turns out, after her father’s death, my mother wanted another child,” E.A. penned. “Without the death of John Raymond Dillingham, I never enter the picture.”

While her relationship with her mother was fraught with emotional and physical pain — “one night, her emotional violence became physical violence,” E.A. wrote of Dillingham — she shares a close bond with her stepmother, Rita Hanks.

“When I say my parents, I really mean my dad and Rita because they’ve been together since before I can really remember,” she told People last week. “They’ve been together since I was 4 or 5.”

Tom and Wilson wed in 1988 and share two sons: Chet Hanks, 34, and Truman Hanks, 29.