Originally appeared on E! Online
For E.A. Hanks, Disneyland has always been the happiest place on earth.
But reflecting on the future in her new memoir “The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road,” the daughter of Tom Hanks and his ex-wife Susan Dillingham admitted that the inevitable death of her dad could change her perspective on the California theme park.
“Disneyland has been more of a constant in my life than any house I have ever lived in,” E.A. Hanks, 42, wrote in the book. “I have spent Thanksgiving there. I have spent Christmas there. I have spent more birthdays than I can count there.”
More importantly, it was where she and Tom Hanks — who is also dad to Colin Hanks, 47, whom he shared with his ex-wife, as well as Chet Hanks, 34, and Truman Hanks, 29, with wife Rita Wilson — developed a deeper bond.
“I cannot separate my emotional connection to Disneyland from my emotional connection to my father,” she added, “because like many other California daughters, I have spent a lot of time at Disneyland with my dad, and because one day he’ll die.”
READ What Tom Hanks Told His Daughter E.A. When She Asked If She Was “Save the Marriage Baby”
Stepping foot inside the park will always remind her of sweet memories with Tom Hanks, 68, especially with his voice as Woody in “Toy Story” immortalized in its rides and merchandise. (He later played Walt Disney himself in 2013’s “Saving Mr. Banks.”)
“I was thinking about that first time I will come back to Disneyland after my father dies — and how I will hear him when I hear Woody,” she continued. “In that moment, it was as if it had already happened, that I was somehow touching on what future me would feel, and I cracked open with emotion.”
But it’s a bittersweet thought for E.A. Hanks, whose full name is Elizabeth Anne Hanks, adding, “Disneyland ensures that a part of my dad will live forever.”
Along with her dad’s legacy at the park, she added that it has “become for me a monument for art, against death.”
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As she put it, “Walt’s vision survives, and some part of my father will too. Art survives.”
Although her relationship with the “Forrest Gump” star is sweeter than a box of chocolates, her dynamic with Dillingham was more complicated. Looking back at her turbulent childhood, E.A. Hanks speculated that her mom may have been battling mental illness.
“Saying that my mother was mentally ill,” she explained in the book, “that she was possibly ‘bipolar with episodes of extreme paranoia and delusion,’ makes sense of the nights sitting with her on a blanket in the driveway, my mother sobbing and convinced there were men inside the house, bugging the walls, waiting for us in our bedrooms.”
By age 14, she realized that her home life was “not right,” noting that there should have been “more food in the house” regularly, she should’ve “had help with homework” and that she shouldn’t have been “woken up at three in the morning to hear an impromptu lecture on why yoga was the devil’s work did not happen in other houses.”
Luckily, E.A. Hanks found support in Wilson, 68, and her brothers in addition to Tom Hanks.
“When I say my parents, I really mean my dad and Rita because they’ve been together since before I can really remember,” she wrote. “They’ve been together since I was 4 or 5.”
“Rita’s not really a stepmother, she’s my other mother,” she noted. “I don’t think I’ve ever really referred to them as my half brothers, which I guess they technically are. 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. We’re a posse.”
Now, read on for a breakdown of the Hanks family.
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