E.A. Hanks Knew Her Memoir Would Have to Go There With Her Family

In March of 2019, 36-year-old Vanity Fair and New York Times contributor E.A. Hanks set off from her hometown of Los Angeles in her beloved 2017 Ford Transit, nicknamed “Minnie,” to recreate a road trip she’d taken with her mother along the transcontinental Interstate 10, from California to Florida, back in 1996. What resulted over these six months make up The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, out this week from Simon & Schuster.

Traveling solo, Hanks is not exactly alone, as she’s joined by still-vivid memories of that first pilgrimage—some pleasant, many not—as well as her mother’s cryptic poetry and diary entries left behind after her death from cancer in 2002. It’s an attempt to understand a loving but complicated woman who was beset with numerous addictions and undiagnosed mental illnesses, as well as an attempt for the writer, approaching 40, to discover where she came from and where she might be headed.

From White Sands National Park in New Mexico down to New Orleans, from the Texas-Mexico border over to the loamy Florida panhandle, Hanks, the daughter of Tom Hanks and sister to actor Colin, wends her way through a Southern landscape—both hallucinatory beautiful and, at times, mundane in its franchised similarity—finding answers to long-held questions, as well as discovering additional mysteries along the way.

Vanity Fair spoke with Hanks about her journey, as well as the blinding, oftentimes tiresome realities of being the daughter of one of the most famous actors the world has ever known, and what might be next for a woman who has aged out of her 30s—a time, she writes, when people come to “realize not everyone is going to make it.”

What was the impetus to take this road trip to follow the trip you took with your mother, back in 1996, when you were 14? Was it a specific event or memory that set it off?

When my mother died in 2002, about a year after her diagnosis, my older brother, Colin, and I were exhausted. The house went on the market and everything went into storage. I grabbed two huge plastic bins of papers, thinking maybe there would be something interesting in there, but they went straight from a storage unit to collecting dust in my own garage.

Years later, around 2017, I had my fill of writing recaps for the web and movie scripts that were never going to be made, so I was hungry. For years, I was pitching this story about the 10 as a series of political landscapes: the Land of Immigration, the Land of Rising Water. The idea was that the landscapes covered by the 10 (the Southwest, Texas, and the Deep South) are where all these cataclysmic issues are coming to a head. That’s true, but it wasn’t enough to sell the story. You’ll be shocked to hear no one took the bait. It just so happened that in the midst of all this, I was moving again and decided to go through those two plastic bins. That’s when I found a journal of my mother’s in which she describes witnessing her father—whom she never, ever spoke about—commit a horrible crime. The moment I read it, I knew I had stumbled onto what was missing from my pitch, and the thing I had learned from writing all those scripts: You have to have skin in the game. You need personal stakes. Once I had that missing puzzle piece, I was on my way. Literally.

Let’s talk about that specific accusation that your mother made against her father, who, by then, was long dead. I mean, it’s just beyond horrific. She wrote that her father, your grandfather, had butchered, tortured, murdered, raped, and dismembered a six-year-old girl named “Natalie.” Was there ever a feeling that, my god, she could be telling the truth?

Yes. And no. There was usually a nugget of truth in what my mother said, but you had to sift through a lot to find it. After years of telling me that whole swathes of our family was wiped out in the Highland Clearances of mid-18th century Scotland, suddenly it became that we were Jewish and our family came to America after the wreckage of World War II. In reality, we had some family from Scotland, but her father’s mother was Jewish and lived in Pittsburgh. So, when I read that journal entry, I knew that something had happened, but it was my goal to untangle it all.

You were the victim of both emotional and physical abuse as a child. And yet the portrait you paint of your mother in this book—as an alcoholic, a drug addict, physically and mentally abusive—is respectful and gracious. You seem to be more saddened with her than angry.

When I was younger, I understood my mom was an addict, and I had a good grip on what that meant because of all the hours I spent at 12-step programs when I should have been at home with a babysitter. But I had no vocabulary for why my mom talked to God out loud or would tell me there were men hiding in our closets waiting for me. She was doing the best she could with what she had, and sometimes that meant she could feed me meals regularly, and sometimes it meant I didn’t see a dentist for a decade. It’s important to remember that it’s been 20 years since she died—I’m not in the immediate splash zone of grief, so I’ve had the time to zoom out a bit and, of course, find a good therapist. I can imagine her life from her perspective—her daughter always rolling her eyes, strangers edging away from her in public, relationships that fell apart as quickly as they appeared. It’s a life that, yes, strikes me as sad. I can be angry for the child I was, and I often am, but a portrayal of my mother that only shows the bad days would be as dishonest as one that only shows the good.

The image of you as a child wiping down tables and handing out Styrofoam cups at Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, and Cocaine Anonymous meetings is heartbreaking.

It wasn’t to me at the time, though. I thought all the kids at school did the same thing in their homes. As an adult and an aunt, that’s one of the things that makes me most angry on my own behalf. It’s also fascinating to me that my mother, who was truly haunted by violence, would expose me to risks like having strange men in her programs come stay in our house. But isn’t that how trauma often works? What isn’t resolved is always repeated.

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Your childhood strikes me as a bit feral, which I always appreciate seeing with an author. To me, if an author grew up on their own and lived an actual life, the resulting book will always show. You weren’t coddled then ushered straight into a university writing program.

That’s a good way of putting it—I was basically either alone reading in my room, or as internet parlance calls it, being a “horse girl.” That meant a lot of getting up at 4 in the morning to shovel shit, use a pole driver to build fences, and occasionally break my bones. Galloping through rice fields gave me an excuse to get out of the house, and it was an early education in process—the time and grit it takes to get good at something. I was in Sacramento recently, and I took my partner to go see where my barn was. When I realized that those fields had been paved over to make track home developments and a fulfillment center, I sobbed helplessly. There’s no green left.

You write that the “unsettledness” of your life has been sort of a “gift.” How so?

I don’t think it’s possible to overstate how much most people do not care for change, big or small. It’s scary and uncomfortable. Of all the inadvertent gifts I’ve inherited from both my parents, by way of their extraordinary lives, the one I am most grateful for is that I am unfazed by change—unless you’re mowing down trees to build another Panera, I guess. In the same way I assumed everyone loves eggnog, I assumed that everyone could ride the wave: moving around a lot, switching up big life goals, even changing your hairstyle. In reality, most people don’t like any of those things. I appreciate that I’m flexible enough to enjoy the now, but the idea of tomorrow looking totally different than today doesn’t throw me. Which helps when you’re driving around the country for six months and never know where you’re sleeping next.

There’s so much mystery as to why or how your mother became the person she became.

I think all parents are mysteries to their children. Ultimately, that’s a conversation about the hand you’ve been dealt—socioeconomically, philosophically, genetically. I think you have to sort through all the history before you can take responsibility for what comes next. No matter how you grew up—even without a famous dad and a crazy mom—being curious about who they were before you showed up, where they came from, and how they got to where they are, is worth being curious about. You’re bound to stumble onto something you weren’t expecting.

Your book is an unvarnished look at what it’s like to grow up in the proximity to pure, unadulterated fame and to witness just how blinding its effects can be to all of those around its source.

My friends have heard me talk about something I call “Hanks Cola.” Hanks Cola is a branded commodity with a strong emotional aftertaste for the public. People like it! It has good memories for them! And yet the feelings are for the product, not the person. This tortured analogy is to say: the fame is not the same thing as my father. He has to navigate it the same as everyone around him. My dad thought he’d made it when he was a Shakespearean actor grinding it out in a repertory theater in Cleveland because he had achieved the goal: He was a working artist. That his burgeoning film career coincided with the economic boom of the VHS market—and the media market becoming global rather than local—speaks more about capitalism and luck than anything else.

Would your father agree with that assessment?

You would have to ask him, but I can say he never flagged it on multiple reads of my book.

Your father, as a celebrity, can be private. How did he—and how does he—feel about you writing a very revealing book about his first wife, your mother?

From the outset, he has supported The 10. Whether it was swapping cars with me, helping me pick out camping gear, or being the first reader. The conversation we had once he had read a very early draft was exactly what I needed to hear, which was that I had depicted my mother accurately. This is what it was like to both love and fear her.

You write that your mother’s view on your father’s fame was one of jealousy and that she felt that it was “catastrophic.” How so?

In the book, I wonder if she was a “would-be actress who never recovered from her ex-husband’s catastrophic fame.” I chose the word “catastrophic” because I think it suits her relationship to my father’s fame. She felt that his stature in the world obliterated her and any chance she had at continuing her stage career. The uncomfortable truth, and there’s a lot of them in this book, is she didn’t really have a career, and her ex-husband becoming the Tom Hanks was more insult to injury than significant impediment. “Catastrophic” also because that brand of megawatt fame erases what actually matters in an artist and what set my dad apart in the first place: humanity and talent. But I chose that word, catastrophic, not her.

The inevitable will perhaps be brought up: that the only reason you were given this opportunity to write and publish the book is that you’re a “nepo baby.” But things aren’t always so clear-cut. You barely knew your father until you were in to your teens.

As the book shows, I wasn’t born on third base, but we moved there in the ’90s. No matter how difficult my childhood with my mother was, the material reality is that I don’t have student loans. That’s how the privilege really does its magic: it sets you up with the right schools, the right jobs, the safety net. It opens all the doors, but the nuance is that it doesn’t keep them open. When we’re talking about the creative fields, and a huge company is making an investment in you and real money is on the line, either you can deliver or you can’t. Not even a shiny last name guarantees that corporate overlords will keep losing money on you. Every working artist has to bring some level of “ROI”; otherwise, you don’t get another chance. The question is: Who gets far enough down the line to try to be worthy of those investments? I don’t have the solutions to global business hierarchies that benefit from inequality of opportunity, but I bet well-funded libraries are part of it. I was set up to win, and that’s the conversation about privilege and access to creative opportunities that I think is most important: supporting a pipeline of diverse talent that gets a real shot. That’s not easy when the only thing you can count on in a creative field is that success is never guaranteed. Ask my dad about Bonfire of the Vanities.

The ending to the book is not a neat conclusion, with all bows tied for the reader. Editors don’t often like this, but it makes for an even sadder, scarier resolution. Sometimes, there just are no simple answers.

The book, all in all, took me 10 years. Five years of conceiving it and trying to find it a home, and then another five of doing the trip and writing it. No part of it was easy—which isn’t to say that it wasn’t fun. Giving the book a tidy, pat ending would be akin to getting all the way to the finish line only to give up. The book has two main threads: our parents and our country. Do we ever get to a conclusion when we’re talking about our mothers? Is there a definitive answer to the confounding question that is America? My favorite conversation I had with a stranger on the trip was with a college student I literally stumbled into while we were both listening to audio tours of a plantation outside of Jacksonville. I was standing there, in one of the surviving quarters of the enslaved workers, talking with a young Black man about what it was we were seeing and learning. About what we were both bringing to the place. That’s not a conversation that came with answers, because the best ones never do.

You write that your 30s “is when you realize: not everyone is going to make it.” Have you had any fresh epiphanies now that you’re in your 40s?

When I was nearing 40, I was very thirsty for any advice I could get from women older than me. Mostly, it was women who had children and would talk to me about motherhood, but I don’t have children and won’t be having any. It felt like I was being given advice on becoming an Olympic pole vaulter. It just didn’t apply to my reality. Three years in, I can say that, thus far, my 40s are a pleasing mix of putting my head down to work as much as possible and enjoying the fact that, around my 39th birthday, I met my partner and for the first time really fell cuckoo in love. I just want to write and make out. That’s the plan.