Source : the age
By Nathan Smith
MEMOIR
The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road
E.A. Hanks
Gallery Books, $70.99
For much of her life, Tom Hanks’ daughter says her father avoided talking about her mother and their tumultuous marriage. The silence meant that E.A. (born “Elizabeth”) “didn’t know the beginning, or even the middle, of my own story” when entering adulthood.
Hanks’ marriage to Susan Dillingham then was a nine-year union cloaked in mystery that resulted in E.A. and actor Colin Hanks. (The Oscar-winning father would later marry actress Rita Wilson and have two more children.) Hanks reveals in her new memoir The 10 how she experienced emotional and (infrequent, physical) abuse at the hands of her unstable mother.
Dillingham suffered severe and undiagnosed mental illnesses, which Hanks now believes was bipolar disorder with episodes of extreme paranoia and delusion. Alcohol and drugs were first used to cope before sobriety and evangelical Christianity was touted as a cure for her condition. (Dillingham died aged 49 of lung cancer in 2002.)
When Hanks was a teenager, her mother took the two of them on a road trip across the “10” – an interstate highway connecting California to Florida – during a rare period of lucidity. The 10 sees 42-year-old Hanks re-create this odyssey with her mother’s rediscovered writings and poetry to “to connect with a woman who … even when she was alive, was incomprehensible”.
Tom Hanks’ daughter E.A. Hanks.
Hanks survived living with her mother until the age of 14, finally fleeing after a physical assault left her unable to tolerate any more mistreatment and mania. There would be midnight rants on why yoga classes were the “devil’s work” and paranoid claims their father was tapping the home phone. It also wasn’t unusual to find the fridge completely bare or discover guns lying around the house (including in a living room sewing box).
The childhood cross-country trip represented one of the few times Hanks felt close to her troubled mother. At pit stops along the highway, the writer shares reflections and revelations made from the second sojourn. There are childhood coping mechanisms still haunting her, including her excoriation disorder (a chronic picking of the skin), alongside the realisation that Dillingham herself may also have been abused as a child.
As Hanks seeks answers on the open road about one tormented parent, she weaves in historical digressions to broaden her focus, reckoning on themes of place and home. These can sometimes feel as if she is deflecting from probing the mother-daughter bond further, pushing it to the side in favour of unwanted history lessons on America’s land borders.
Despite these narrative diversions, The 10 holds its core as a brave and baring journey on seeking closure with lingering emotional trauma wrought from years of abuse.
“[T]he stories we tell about the places we’re from become part of the stories we tell about who we are,” she writes. At once unsentimental and searching, the memoir sees a daughter attempt to reimagine her story of becoming alongside the life of a parent who had first painfully shaped it.
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