Tom Hanks Opens Up About Daughter's 'Bold' Memoir

Tom Hanks' daughter, E.A. Hanks, wrote a memoir earlier this year titled "The 10."

In the book, Hanks discusses the alleged emotional abuse and physical violence she suffered at the hands of her mother, Susan Dillingham.

During an interview ahead of the release of his latest film, Tom Hanks reflected on his daughter's decision to share her story, as well as the method in which she chose to do it.

"If you've had kids, you realize that you see who they are when they're about six weeks old," Hanks said about his daughter while speaking with "Access Hollywood" at the premiere of "The Phoenician Scheme.

"I'm not surprised that my daughter had the wherewithal as well as the curiosity, as well as, I'm going to say, perhaps, the shoot-herself-in-the-foot kind of wherewithal in order to examine this thing that I think she was very honest about. We all come from checkered, cracked lives, all of us."

Hanks said that his daughter has a "bold, journalistic mind," and that he's proud of how openly she's shared her experiences.

In her book, E.A. Hanks - short for Elizabeth Ann - details her experiences with her mother and Hanks' first wife. She says Dillingham was abusive and neglectful, and considered her childhood to be "years filled with confusion, violence, [and] deprivation."

"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," Hanks said in the memoir.

E.A. and Colin Hanks were born during Tom's first marriage to Dillingham, while Chet and Truman Hanks were both born during Tom's current marriage to Rita Wilson.

Hanks and Dillingham were married for nine years and were divorced in 1987. Dillingham died of lung cancer in 2002 at the age of 49. 

“When a friend asks me, ‘What was your mom like?’ I sometimes wish for an easier answer,” E.A. said in her book.

“It’s an uncomfortable truth that if she’d regularly hit me, I could say, ‘She was abusive,’ and everyone, as the lyrics of one of her favorite records put it, ‘would know exactly what I was talking about.’”