To The Contrary

Funding for To The Contrary provided by: This week on To The Contrary: My mother's entire persona history was shrouded in mystery.

And in these journals, she describes witnessing her father commit a truly hellacious crime.

I realized like, oh, this i what is missing from the story I'm trying to tell about America.

Hello, I'm Bonnie Erb.

Welcome to To The Contrary, a discussion of news and social trends from varied perspectives.

Today we have the pleasure of sharing half an hour with E.A.

Hanks.

She is the daughter of renowned actor Tom Hanks and author of the new memoir, The 10.

So welcome, and thank you for being here.

Thank you for having me.

It's my pleasure.

Thank you.

So, you're also a former staffer at Vanity Fair magazine and contributor to the New York Times.

The 10 is about your solo road trip along Route 10 through the American Southwest, retracing a journey you once took with your mother, Susan Dillingham.

In it, you blend your own personal history travel writing, and real crime as you investigate family secrets and explore your own identity, memory, and legacy.

Thrilled you could join us.

Thank you.

So why The 10?

Well, the 10, which is what, you know, Angelinos call Interstate 10, which goes from Santa Monica, California, all the way to Jacksonville, Florida.

It's kind of ocean to ocean.

It's The 10, because that is the trip that my mother and I took the first summer after I switched custody between my parents.

I had grown up in Sacramento, California, with just my mother and my older brother.

And midway through the seventh grade, when teenage herd dynamics are just about at their most brutal, the situation with my mom had been kind of devolving, and it finally sort o crossed that rubricon into which I was finally able to sort o change up my custody arrangement And the first summer after I moved to Los Angeles, my mom announce that she had bought a Winnebago and that we were going to drive Interstate 10 to the central Florida town where my grandmother lived and where, as I discovered, about 4 to 5 generations of my family is from.

And that summer was kind of like aalmost like a Greek Odyssey, in that my mother and I, who were not particularly speaking to each other at the time, she was so deeply wounded by the changes I had made in our lives.

You know, we were there we were in New Mexico and Texas and driving through New Orleans in the middle of the night.

And when I was starting to, you know, feel like I wanted a bigger project because at the time I was sort of, you know, paying the bills by recapping television shows and writing jokes for other people.

I remembered the 10 as kind of being thethe backbone of the American myth.

It goes through these landscapes that are so fundamental to the dream of America the Southwest, Texas, the Deep South that it seemed to me that there was a rich artery of stories and narrative to mind that would mimi my own sort of sense of trying to place myself in that American myth and in the myth of my individual family.

And was it hard?

Did you have to kind of move the pieces around, going from, I suppose, sequentially from this situation to another situation to another monument?

To whatever The book is a success in that it exists, but it is also a failed magazine article.

And it is also a failed podcast.

So originally, the idea that I was sort of pitching was a story that had no personal stakes whatsoever.

It was it seemed to me that The 10 was went through a series of political theaters of immigration, infrastructure, climate change and voter suppression.

And that was the story I was trying to sell, and no editor was interested in getting that story from me whatsoever.

But it wasn't until I found these journals of my mother in which she describes witnessing her father who she never, ever spoke about.

And in fact, my my mother's entire persona history was shrouded in mystery.

And through the veil of her inability to sort of keep reality in check.

But in these journals, she describes witnessing her father commit a truly hellacious crime.

And once I saw that, and immediately responded, not as a daughter, but as a reporter, I think in part because that allowed some some degree of emotional distance.

I realized like, oh, this i what is missing from the story I'm trying to tell about America, which is thismy, me and my mother and the culture that we come from.

Placing that in the larger narrative is, is what was missing.

And once I had that piece, the book really came together as a book.

And I was able to hit the road with sort of the compass that had been missing from all the previous iterations of the story.

I don't kno if you can talk about the crime without, or what she was involved with, without closing any loopholes for upcoming readers.

But can you?

Yeah.

So essentially what I knew about my grandfather is that he was a military man.

That he hadwas a career, you know, career serviceman, that he had served multiple tours and multiple wars.

And other than that, you know, my only interaction with him waswaswas twofold.

One, I had once asked my father if I was a save the marriage baby, and he said, no, you were not, but you were a someone died and I feel the urge to create life baby, which was that my grandfathers passing precedes my entrance onto the world stage.

And then the other was in the eighth grade.

I was on the sort of classic American school trip to our nation's capital and I peeled off from a trip to Arlington National Cemetery to see his grave.

And when I reported that fact to my mother, she didn't She went to her room, close the door, and didn't speak to me for, like, like, a fortnight.

And I realized that I had transgressed some boundary that she had never communicated to me.

And in the journals, I can see why, which is she describes her father... sexually assaulting and murdering aa young girl and the the sort of details of i are florid and in a major key.

It's as bad as it can get.

Ithe way that I describe is its like a podcast worthy cr or at the time, I thought it was.

It turns out it's a book worthy crime.

And the.... you know, it was sort of the definition of shock, but not surprise that if any part of this accusation was true, my mother's sort of failure to launch as a holistic kind of human being in the world made a lot more sense to me.

But I had a deep curiosity about the degree to which these accusations were rooted in reality, because I understood my mom's relationship with reality was fluid.

Now, as a grown daughter is it fair for a parent to hide that much?

I don't have kids and I feel like you can't really speak to thethe the ethics of parenting without literal skin in the game.

But I can say that, certainly, I don't think my mother wa choosing to keep things from me.

I think she couldn't keep her own the events of her own life in order.

So how could she sort of line them up for for me to understand?

But I do think there is something interesting and trick about what shades of the truth do we share with our children and how can we prepare them to handle, you know, deeper and deeper complexity as they get older and are able to sort of take in more about the everyday humanity of their parents?

You know, people whoI think we all think of our parent as sort of like gods, you know, whose cataclysmic meeting results in the center of the universeourselves.

And I think when you are getting older and you start to see your parents, justjust as people who got pregnant, thethethe mystery, for me, does not diminish.

It actually deepens and becomes even more fascinating.

Tell me just a little bit about each parent and how whatever characteristic or characteristics you're describing impacted you.

My mother was, grew up in a in an itinerant military family, which is something I did not know until I did the book.

They moved around an incredible amount of, amounteverywhere from Camp Lejeune to 29 Palms, deep in the Mojave Desert, to a Hawaii iteration that I was completely ignorant of.

And she had a mother who was one of the first women in the family to ever graduate college.

My grandmother was a very literate person.

She was a very sophisticated person.

She loved classical music and literature, and that is something she certainly passed on to her daughter.

And she was also my grandmother was also a Southern woman, and perhaps the great sort of Venn diagram between a Southern culture and a military culture is: we don't talk about that.

That isthat is on the no-go list.

My father is also from a family of one sister and three brothers, which, by the way, so am I.

And he grew up just as itinerant as my mother did, but with a ever changing cast of characters, of step parents and step siblings who would enter the picture and then leave the picture.

His parents split when he was quite young, and they both married an divorced and married, divorced many times over.

And my parents met at SAC State College in Sacramento, California and they were the theater kids, and they were not particularly close.

They weren't dating or anything.

What happened wa my mother had her heart broken.

And in the sort of lonely aftermath of a devastating breakup she let the nerdy theater guy, take a crack and, as they say, yada, yada yada.

My brother Colin was born.

And so these were two people who were doing the best with what they were given, an they were not given very much.

They were given chaos, disorder certainly, a coping mechanism, mechanism of artmaking and laughter and, and even at that time, there were hints that my mother washad a deeper struggle and wa starting to be someone who heard the voice of God and answered it whenever she heard it.

She was someone who began to feel that there were peopl hiding in the walls of her house and planning her destruction, and that my father was somehow colluding in those efforts.

And so as, is pretty understood in, in mental health circles, you know, herher mental health was diminishing rapidly asas she aged.

Excuse me.

And as my older brother and I entered the scene things really start to pick up.

And by the time Colin and I are in our adolescence, my mother is, she has friends and sort of loved ones, but they're all kind of intermittently banished from her presence and brought back in.

It was just a very chaotic and confusing time.

In part because she was also an addict with a very serious problem for a large part of my very early childhood.

And then, you know, the the great miracle of her life is that she was eventually clean and sober and to the best and to the best of my knowledge, never relapsed.

So, you know that's who you're dealing with.

You're dealin with two sensitive, thoughtful, kind of broken children that crash up against each other in that safe space of, of of a college campus where everyone is learning to be in community and make art together.

Going back and fort between Sacramento andand LA.

Was that eye opening because there's, you know, Sacramento at leas until 30, 40 something years ago was kind of thi idyllic American farm community.

Yeah.

And Hollywood isif there's such a thin as an opposite, it's Hollywood.

One of the questions that sent me on the road was like, well, where am I from?

I was born in Burbank, California.

I was sort of raised to early adolescence in Sacramento.

Then I switched custody and then was back in Los Angeles.

And then, of course, in between, as all divorced children of divorce know there's weekends kind of spent.

And it was like going back and forth between two different planets.

You know, my what Sacramento gave me, which is an immense privilege, is anonymity.

I'm sure there's a lot of Therethere are some people, who over the past month have been like, To Hanks has a daughter?

You know, which is an evidence of how total that privacy was.

And I was able to grow up in a time mostly before the internet, mostly before tabloids who focus on the children of, and that meant that I go to grow up without kind of like, the white hot glare of public attention, which I think was really the making of me on, on some leve that I was able to, to grow up just, you know, mostly my mother's daughter and my big brothers sister and then, you knowan that was a very insular sort of it wasn't quite Gray Gardens.

There wasn't quite as many raccoons, but there were definitely as many stacks of newspapers and books and dusty cans of pat.

But then I would go and visit, my Los Angeles family, where suddenly there's grandparents and cousins and uncles and three meals a da and family dinner every night.

And it was a, you know, and the phone that is always ringing because essentially you're living in the the corporate headquarters of Tom Hanks Incorporated.

Whereas, you know, my mother's house, the phone hardly ever rang.

And what we really had around was stacks of books and classical music playing.

So it was very, very different.

Yeah.

Were you surprised when you got old enough to get out in the real world, and your father had by that point become famous were you surprised at people's reaction to you?

Did they idolize you or how did they?

Myself?

Yeah.

No, no, no, no.

I mean, it's you know, I think most people would, you know, I think I have a very I have a very vague memory of being like in the fifth grade and seeing reference to my existence in a magazine once.

And I think, I think th magazine described me as being the adopted Hanks.

I remember being like, look at my face.

You couldn't I stole his face and slapped it on top of my neck.

It'sits You know, II had no concept of anyone being aware of me.

I don't I think the vastfor good reason the vast majority of people have no idea that I exist.

But I was aware, certainly, that my dad's kind of thethethe degree of my dad's fame certainly changed at a very specific point.

My older brother and I called itwe call it BG and AG, which is Before Gump and After Gump.

The phenomenon of that film and the chord that it struck and the larger culture was such that, it was just a cataclysmic upgrade of everything in our lives.

I think it's fair to say that I was not born on third base, but we definitely moved there in the 90s.

Do younow tell me, what's the hardest thing about your personal life, about your family life, for you to have put in the book an and what was the reaction to it?

The hardest thing for me to put in the book, oh, was also the thing that I knew was entirely necessary for the book, which is my mother's poetry, along with the journal wit the accusation about her father.

I find this binder of poetry of my mother's, which I knew that she wrote, but she never let me see it.

And as I was going through it, I realized that a lot of the poems covered that road trip we took together in 1996.

And certainly one of the more tricky things to explain to readers is that my mother had this concept of herself as sort of, she could have been a contender had not my dad's, as I describe it, catastrophic fam kind of obliterated her chances.

But I and the majority of the people that I spoke to in her life all sort of understood that that was not the case, that my mother was not heade for great stardom as an actress.

And that's a tricky thing to show that level of vulnerability and delusion about someone you care about.

And certainly as a fellow artist, everyonewe're all afraid that we're deluded about what we have to offer the world.

But I also think that, I got to kind of rescue her artistic ambitions by including her not as an actress, but as a writer and editing her work, with all of my experience as a professional writer and editor over the course of 20 years, was a way of engaging with her in good faith as an artist.

And I think that showing her work because there's sections that are of her work that I show that are unedite and really show the depth of her madness, and it's very, it's, it's sort of like a confrontation.

You know, you've been hearing about this person and and their mental health.

But when you kind of get a, you know, those you know, when scientists go to the Arctic and they drill dow to get some core sample of ice that reveals, you know, deep truths about how how the planet has existed.

You know, showing my mother's poetry unedited is sort of like tha Arctic sample of the deep core of what she was wrestling with inside of her own mind.

And Ithe pressure to get that right and to have people walk away with both sides of her, of the madness, but of the artistry that she did have and the taste and the skil that she did have as a writer, I think was something that I certainly fretted over almost more than anything else in the book, for sure.

And speaking of fretting, when it came out recently, did you ever hav the thought that, gee, I think I maybe I shouldn't have said that.

Knock on wood, not yet.

Yeah, inshaAllah, not yet.

But I think that thethe I think any sort of concerns I had about that were really mitigated by the fact that very early o in this project, which is now a, you know, it's taken in total perfectly enough, ten years.

I had a conversation with my older brother, who's really the true only other veteran of this, of this war that was my mother's house that that I can share this experience with.

And then also with my fathers, I recognize that there's no way I can tell my story of me and mom without occasionally, you know, swerving in to both of your lanes.

And I really can't attempt this without some modicum of of blessing.

And, you know, you really can't get more supportive than here, take my car.

You know, and the, the, the very first sort of whole draft that I had of the book, the first people to read it were my dad and my brother.

And they gave me the greatest gift, which was to say that this is a fair and accurate depiction of, of this woman who we all loved and feared on some level.

Loved and feared?

Yeah, I think... Why so?

Loved and feared will make sense to anybody who grew up in a house where the shadow of violence was ever present, and when the perso that you love the most is also the person you fear the most, that is a very potent sort of alchemy of intimac that exists between two people.

I love my mother and I was terrified of her.

On a bad day, there wasthere was no more fearsome boogeyman.

But on a good day, there was more there was I never felt more seen or understood than when I was with my mother.

And that's a complicated yin and yang toto try and capture, and I hope I've I've done my best to do so.

Have you come to terms with it?

You know I was at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books this past weekend, and I was on a panel wit some really incredible writers.

And we were in the theit was a really cheerful top The, the, the the panel was about grief.

And there was this question about do you write for catharsis?

Do you write as therapy?

And my response was: Good God, no.

You know, I think it's really important forfor readers to kno that I did not write this book in this sort of immediate splash zone, as it were, of grief.

My mothermy mother passed, you know, 20 years ago.

She passed when I was 20 years old.

I'm now 42 and a good, solid 20 years of therapy has happened in between then and now.

And do you have on that note, since we're getting to the en of our time, do you have ideas for a next project?

Something that adds kind of emotional oomph to the publishing of The 10 is tha I actually received a book deal in my early 20s, when I was straight off of the Huffington Post and a four hour news cycle, and I had no idea how to write a book.

And I got everything I ever wanted with a book deal for a series of children's novels.

And I choked, I choked hard, I choked hard to the point where I didn'twas not able to write for over 15 years.

So the publishing of The 10 is not just the resolution of my mother and mines story, but of my own sort of creative recovery.

So I'm happy to say that I am going back and finishing those children's novels that I'm very excited will be coming out in the, in the future.

So, right now I'm all about coming home from a book tour, cleaning out the fridge, doing some laundry, and getting back to the desk.

Yeah, well, all the best of luck to you, and what a wonderful story.

Thank you so much, EA Hanks, I really appreciate your time.

Everybody, run out and buy the book.

That's it for this edition of To The Contrary.

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