E.A. Hanks found a friend in stepmom Rita Wilson. As the 42-year-old, the only daughter of Tom Hanks and his late ex-wife Susan Dillingham, shares rare details about her rocky childhood in her new book The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, she’s also reflecting on her close bond with her stepmom.
“When I say my parents, I really mean my dad and Rita because they’ve been together since before I can really remember,” E.A., short for Elizabeth Anne, told People in an interview published on April 8. “They’ve been together since I was 4 or 5.” Tom and Rita, both 68—who first met on the set of ABC’s Bosom Buddies in 1981—started dating in 1986, one year after he divorced Susan. After two years of dating, the Sleepless in Seattle duo got married in 1988 and later had sons Chester “Chet” Hanks, 34, and Truman Hanks, 29.
Tom also shares Colin Hanks, 47, with his ex-wife, who went by the stage name Samantha Lewes. And since Rita’s been such a big presence for most of her life, E.A. emphasized, “Rita’s not really a stepmother, she’s my other mother.” That’s also her mindset when it comes to delineating her relationship with Chet and Truman. “I don’t think I’ve ever really referred to them as my half brothers, which I guess they technically are,” she added.
“Chester was five when I moved to Los Angeles and Truman had just been born, so neither of them remember a time when I didn’t live with them. We’re a posse.” While E.A. has fond memories with her dad and Rita, she gets candid about the difficulties she had growing up with her mom, who died in 2002 at 49 after battling bone cancer. In her memoir, she details the alleged abuse that Susan inflicted on her after divorcing Tom in 1985.
As E.A. recounted, Susan—who had primary custody of her and Colin at the time—abruptly moved them from Los Angeles to Sacramento, and she noted her “5 to 14 years” in the city was “filled with confusion, violence, deprivation, and love.” “As the years went on, the backyard became so full of dog s–t that you couldn’t walk around it,” she described of her former home in an excerpt, per People. “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.” However, she found solace in Colin, who helped “take care” of her after the mistreatment. “I think that when you share an experience, like our childhood, it’s a bond of intimacy that is hard to describe,” she continued, “easy to maintain and really compensated for the lack of attachment I was getting elsewhere.”
