E.A. Hanks Knew Her Memoir Would Have to Go There With Her Family

In March of 2019, 36-year-old Vanity Fair and New York Times contributor E.A. Hanks set off from her hometown of Los Angeles in her beloved 2017 Ford Transit, nicknamed “Minnie,” to recreate a road trip she’d taken with her mother along the transcontinental Interstate 10, from California to Florida, back in 1996. What resulted over these six months make up The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, out this week from Simon & Schuster.

Traveling solo, Hanks is not exactly alone, as she’s joined by still-vivid memories of that first pilgrimage—some pleasant, many not—as well as her mother’s cryptic poetry and diary entries left behind after her death from cancer in 2002. It’s an attempt to understand a loving but complicated woman who was beset with numerous addictions and undiagnosed mental illnesses, as well as an attempt for the writer to discover where she came from and where she might be headed.

From White Sands National Park in New Mexico down to New Orleans, from the Texas-Mexico border over to the loamy Florida panhandle, Hanks, the daughter of Tom Hanks and sister to actor Colin, wends her way through a Southern landscape—both hallucinatory beautiful and, at times, mundane in its franchised similarity—finding answers to long-held questions, as well as discovering additional mysteries along the way.

Vanity Fair spoke with Hanks about her journey, as well as the blinding, oftentimes tiresome realities of being the daughter of one of the most famous actors the world has ever known, and what might be next for a woman who has aged out of her 30s—a time, she writes, when people come to “realize not everyone is going to make it.”

What was the impetus to take this road trip to follow the trip you took with your mother, back in 1996, when you were 14? Was it a specific event or memory that set it off?

When my mother died in 2002, about a year after her diagnosis, my older brother, Colin, and I were exhausted. The house went on the market and everything went into storage. I grabbed two huge plastic bins of papers, thinking maybe there would be something interesting in there, but they went straight from a storage unit to collecting dust in my own garage.

Years later, around 2017, I had my fill of writing recaps for the web and movie scripts that were never going to be made, so I was hungry. For years, I was pitching this story about the 10 as a series of political landscapes: the Land of Immigration, the Land of Rising Water. The idea was that the landscapes covered by the 10 (the Southwest, Texas, and the Deep South) are where all these cataclysmic issues are coming to a head. That’s true, but it wasn’t enough to sell the story. You’ll be shocked to hear no one took the bait. It just so happened that in the midst of all this, I was moving again and decided to go through those two plastic bins. That’s when I found a journal of my mother’s in which she describes witnessing her father—whom she never, ever spoke about—commit a horrible crime. The moment I read it, I knew I had stumbled onto what was missing from my pitch, and the thing I had learned from writing all those scripts: You have to have skin in the game. You need personal stakes. Once I had that missing puzzle piece, I was on my way. Literally.

Let’s talk about that specific accusation that your mother made against her father, who, by then, was long dead. I mean, it’s just beyond horrific. She wrote that her father, your grandfather, had butchered, tortured, murdered, raped, and dismembered a six-year-old girl named “Natalie.” Was there ever a feeling that, my god, she could be telling the truth?

Yes. And no. There was usually a nugget of truth in what my mother said, but you had to sift through a lot to find it. After years of telling me that whole swathes of our family was wiped out in the Highland Clearances of mid-18th century Scotland, suddenly it became that we were Jewish and our family came to America after the wreckage of World War II. In reality, we had some family from Scotland, but her father’s mother was Jewish and lived in Pittsburgh. So, when I read that journal entry, I knew that something had happened, but it was my goal to untangle it all.