Journey of Reckoning: EA Hanks Confronts Her Mother’s Legacy and America’s Haunted Past
EA Hanks reflects on her abusive childhood with her mother, Susan, and her journey to healing through a cross-country road trip and memoir, The 10.
Surviving on Thin Ice: EA Hanks Recounts Her Painful Childhood, Complicated Family History, and the Healing Journey That Became Her Memoir “The 10”
For the most part, EA Hanks, daughter of the very illustrious actor Tom Hanks, was brought under this extremely complex, traumatic, and emotionally thunderous shroud by fame through most of her life. Her memoir is The 10, which is not only her personal reckoning with her mother’s troubled past but also a more expansive journey into the American psyche – its myths, violence, and illusions. Hanks retraced a road trip she once took at 14 with her abusive, mentally ill mother Susan (formerly known as actress Samantha Lewes), a journey marked by silence, confusion, and emotional pain. But decades later, she took to the same stretch of Interstate 10 seeking understanding, not only of her family history but also of the deeper wounds etched into the American landscape.
Her relations with her mother were deeply fragmented. EA talks of a childhood rife with neglect and violence such as being punched in the face at 13 to months of short food and hygiene. Her mother’s delusions included hearing God’s voice and thinking there were cameras buried behind her walls, an unstable environment which checked visibility and kept EA always aware. His father filled his house with assistants and schedules and family dinners in Los Angeles, a planet of structure and glamour. With Sacramento being anonymous, the jolting changeovers between the two worlds heightened her acute perception of her fractured identity.
Her mother died in 2002 without giving out most answers, leaving only a hint to the trauma that shrouded her life along with some madness. Years later, EA came across a disturbingly revealing entry in her mother’s journal where she accused her own father of committing the most unspeakable of crimes. Be it delusion or buried truth, it added yet another layer of confusion. To founder his bearings, EA borrowed his father’s van – affectionately known to him as the “Shit Box” – and traveled along their itinerant journey once again in 1996, using her mother’s journal and poems for guidance through both emotional and geographical terrain.
Read more: Katherine Heigl Hints at ‘27 Dresses’ Sequel in Talks
Between Houston and Tucson, she saw the double-sidedness of America: the haunting beauty of the landscapes and the historical violence they conceal. From Confederate museums to neglected backroads, she connected her personal traumas with national ones-determined that both required face-to-face confrontation of uncomfortable truths before healing could even begin. Her observations cut sharp into the observer, especially as she notes that the country’s empty spaces constitute more than nature; “they’re just places where crimes happened, where people were annihilated”.
It is not a charge against or a defense of her mother; in fact, it is completely complex, how somebody can be both monstrous and gifted, broken and loving. One of the poems by Susan that he would be including in the book is something erratic, something painfully beautiful, a glimpse into the feared woman, now perceived through empathy and grief.
Her own independent voice; first as a journalist, then as a writer of scripts, and now as a memoirist, the present work comes closest to the most personal and cathartic for EA Hanks, with The 10. It is really the tale of survival, of curiosity, and finally, an attempt to understand madness in a mother, alongside a nation’s fractured identity.
We’re now on WhatsApp. Click to join.
Like this post?
Register at One World News to never miss out on videos, celeb interviews, and best reads.
