E.A. Hanks talks about growing up in Sacramento after her parents split, her mother's cancer and mental health struggles, and a single family photo from her high school graduation that brought her whole fractured family together: her father, mother, stepmother, and brother.
So did you grow up here?
Yeah, I was born here and I.
Lived here till I was around 5. And then my parents split and I ended up living in Sacramento in Northern California. And so I basically grew up with just my mom and my older brother.
Why Sacramento?
That's where she had family ties at the time. Her mother was living there.
And so one day my dad came.
To pick us up from school because.
It was his weekend, you know, or his week. And the teachers looked at him and.
Said, colin and Elizabeth haven't been here for weeks. We thought they were home with you.
Or sick or something like that. And so what had happened is my mom had just absconded with us to Northern California and that's how we ended up there.
And was the divorce not friendly? No, extremely acrimonious at 5 years old. Do you remember that tension?
No, no, I don't, but it's funny. So yesterday was my first day with.
No longer having anonymity.
Yesterday, a People magazine story came out.
About my family and this mystery at the heart of my book.
And I was on ktla and it.
Turns out a lot of people watch daytime and suddenly it felt like I could hear all these conversations of like, Tom Hanks has a daughter. Like, how do I not know that? It's like, well, you don't know that because I grew up in Sacramento and.
I wanted to work for the magazines rather than be in them. One of the pictures that People magazine ran with my permission because I gave.
It to them is the only picture.
That exists where it's my dad, my older brother, my mother, me and my stepmother. And it's the only time in my.
Life that I've ever stood with all three of my parents and my older brother. It never happened before, it never happened after.
And it was at my high school graduation. And at the time in the photo, you can see my mom's hair is.
A little crooked because she's dying of.
Cancer and she's wearing her very best wig to come and put herself in this incredibly vulnerable space.
And to be present for me. And the state of my parents post divorce relationship is really informed by the fact that my dad is going on to become one of the most famous people on the planet as my mother descends into a mental health state that is unable to keep reality in its own lane. And so it was acrimonious not because they were fighting over custody or because my mom wanted more, you know, child support.
They were fighting because my mom thought.
My dad had sent the CIA to.
Kill her.
Which makes things tense.
Wow.
Yeah.
