Tom Hanks has spoken about his daughter’s recent comments about ‘violence and deprivation’ while on the red carpet.
On Thursday, the actor was on the red carpet for Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme and was asked about his daughter E.A Hanks, short for Elizabeth Anne, and her memoir.
In the tell-all titled The 10: A Memoir of Family and The Open Road, EA opened up about her turbulent early years, and revealed she had a childhood of ‘violence and deprivation’ with her mother.
The interviewer asked Tom how proud he felt of his only daughter, given her recent success with her novel.
‘There is a pride because she shares it with me,’ he said in an interview with Access Hollywood. ‘She’s very open about what the process is.’
‘As a dad, if you’ve had kids you realise that you see who they are when they’re about 6 weeks old. Their personality is on display right there, their temper, the way they see the world is demonstrated in their body language and on their face,’ he said.
‘I’m not surprised that my daughter had the wherewithal as well as the curiosity as well as I’m going to say perhaps shoot herself in the foot kind of wherewithal in order to examine this thing.
‘That I think she was incredibly honest about.’
He then praised her work and said she was proud of her mind.
‘We all come from checkered, cracked lives, all of us. Despite the fact that part of it would seem as though she worked for some international, well-known firm with a copyrighted last name.
‘She knows that and she leans into absolutely everything. I think anybody who does that is a bold journalistic, literate mind, and I’m just thrilled I can say the same thing about my daughter.’
The book is an account of the six-month road trip she took in 2019 from Los Angeles to Florida.The book follows EA as she seeks to know more about her late mother’s troubled life.
EA’s mother, Susan Dillingham, died in 2002 from lung cancer at the age of 49. EA was just 19 at the time.
In her memoir, EA claims she and her brother, Colin Hanks, were physically abused and neglected by Dillingham. She also claimed that they lived with her until their custody arrangement changed after their mother got violent.
‘One night, 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 wrote in an excerpt published by People.
‘My custody arrangement basically switched — now I lived in L.A. and visited Sacramento on the weekends and in the summer.’
The writer also claimed that her actor father once had to ‘track her down’ after she was taken out of school.
‘My dad came to pick us up from school and we’re not there,’ she said. ‘And it turns out we haven’t been there for two weeks and he has to track us down.’
The 10: A Memoir of Family And The Open Road by EA Hanks was released on April 8.
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