Reading Time: 3 minutes

Tom Hanks has been described as “America’s dad,” due to his warm, paternal onscreen persona.

And the screen legend’s private and public lives are in alignment there, as he enjoys close relationships with all four of his adult children.

But that doesn’t mean that all of the Hanks kids enjoyed happy, healthy upbringings.

In fact, Tom’s eldest daughter, Elizabeth — who goes by E.A. Hanks professionally — is soon to release a memoir detailing her chaotic and damaging childhood.

E.A. Hanks suffered a chaotic, unstable childhood

Along with her brother Colin, E.A. is a product of Tom’s short-lived marriage to fellow actor Samantha Lewes, who died from cancer in 2002 at the age of 49.

The couple married in 1977, welcomed E.A. in ’82, separated in 85, and divorced two years later.

Lewes was initially granted primary custody in the split, and according to E.A., the years she spent living with her mother resulted in lasting trauma.

“She pushed me, shook me, pulled at my hair and locked me in a closet once or twice … she told me there were men hiding in her closet who were waiting for us to go to sleep to come out and do horrible things,” Hanks writes, according to Page Six.

Lewes would reportedly carry on about “dozens of miscarried babies, [E.A.’s] lost siblings,” and insinuate that she would eventually “join them in eternal limbo.”

E.A. notes that there were occasional fun times, too — though in some ways, they were equally chaotic.

Lewes would drive her children “all over California to horse shows at ungodly hours” and “cut up cookie dough for my friends sleeping over and let me dye my hair every color I wanted.”

It was only when E.A. moved in with her father and his second wife, Rita Wilson, that she gained any sense of what a normal childhood looked like.

She realized, she writes, that “there should have been more food in the house on a regular basis” and that being awoken in the middle of the night to hear “an impromptu lecture on why yoga was the devil’s work” was not the sort of thing that most kids are subjected to.

The lingering effects of childhood trauma

To this day, E.A. writes, she struggles with many of the duties of adulthood, as they were never modeled for her when she was young.

She says she was in her thirties before it occurred to her that she should start seeing a dentist regularly, and she still struggles to “keep food in my house on a consistent basis.”

Sadly, E.A.’s experiences are relatable to tens of millions of Americans.

And we’re sure many will find comfort in the knowledge that that sort of dysfunction can be overcome — and that it can even be found in the family of America’s dad.