E.A. Hanks, the only daughter of legendary screen star Tom Hanks, opened up about how important her relationship with her stepmother Rita Wilson is following her turbulent childhood in Sacramento.
The 42-year-old revealed to People ahead of the release of her new book, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, that she considered Rita her mother soon after the actress married Tom in 1988.
“Rita’s not really a stepmother, she’s my other mother,” she told the outlet.
“When I say my parents, I really mean my dad and Rita, because they’ve been together since before I can really remember. They’ve been together since I was four or five.”
Tom married E.A.’s mother, Samantha Lewes (who was born Susan Dillingham), in 1978.
The pair welcomed their son, Colin, in 1977, and E.A. in 1982, yet went their separate ways in 1985.
E.A. and Colin went to live with their mother in Sacramento after the split, six hours away from Tom’s home in Los Angeles.
According to the author, she would visit Tom, Rita, and her half-brothers Chet and Truman “on the weekends and during summers,” until E.A. turned 14 and her mother suffered a mental health break.
“The backyard became so full of dog [excrement] that you couldn’t walk around it, the house stank of smoke,” she recalled in her memoir.
© Getty Images“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.”
She then recounted the moment that everything changed for their family. “[Samantha] pushed me, shook me, pulled at my hair and locked me in a closet once or twice,” E.A. wrote.
“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.”
© Getty Images“Her emotional violence became physical violence, and in the aftermath, I moved to Los Angeles, right smack in the middle of the seventh grade,” she explained.
Tom and Samantha’s custody arrangement effectively switched overnight, meaning that E.A. would visit her mother sparingly and spent more time with Rita, who took the teen under her wing.
E.A. also shares a close relationship with Chet and Truman, who were much younger when she moved in with Tom and Rita.
© Instagram“I don’t think I’ve ever really referred to them as my half-brothers, which I guess they technically are,” she told People. “Because 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.”
She added: “I think we’re all kind of in that era of trying to get our own thing going and individuate and all of that, but we’re a posse.”
Tom met Rita in 1981 on the set of Bosom Buddies, however, the pair remained friends until Tom’s separation from Samantha in 1985.
To learn more about Tom’s family, see below…
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