Where She Was From

Elizabeth Hanks at age 3 playing in McKinley Park (Courtesy of E.A. Hanks)

Maybe it’s something in the riverine waters, but Sacramento seems to have developed a knack for turning out female writers who exquisitely put pen to paper about their hometown. Think Joan Didion, Greta Gerwig, and now E.A. Hanks, whose debut book, The 10, chronicles a journey of discovery and reflection during a solo road trip along the titular cross-country highway in search of answers to long-burning questions born of a complicated childhood.

“I grew up a Sacramento girl,” Hanks writes in an earlier piece commissioned for a coffee-table edition of Gerwig’s screenplay for 2017’s Lady Bird  (she has also written for publications like The New York Times, The Guardian  and The Huffington Post). “I don’t remember a time before I lived there and when I moved away, I’d already been shaped into the woman I would always be.”

Elizabeth Anne Hanks spent her youth in East Sacramento’s tony Fabulous Forties, coincidentally across the street from the blue house immortalized in Gerwig’s semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story. Teenaged protagonist Christine, played by Saoirse Ronan, fantasized that living in such a temple of upper-middle-class grace surely must be the gateway to a charmed life.

Hanks’ early life, however, was the opposite of charmed, despite her being the daughter of another erstwhile Sacramentan, Tom Hanks. Her parents met as acting students in the drama department at Sacramento State, but it was not, the younger Hanks explains, a romance for the ages. “My mom let my dad take a crack because she was brokenhearted over some big hunky Irishman,” she says on a video call from her home in Los Angeles. “So in her devastation, she let the nerdy theater guy try his best line out. Yada, yada, yada, Colin was born.” That would be actor and filmmaker Colin Hanks, 47, who himself immortalized his childhood memories when he directed the 2015 documentary All Things Must Pass about the rise and fall of Sacramento’s iconic Tower Records. Elizabeth, now 42, was born four and a half years later.

E.A. Hanks, who left Sacramento as a teenager, often still considers the River City to be her home. (Portrait by Anderson Matthew, courtesy of E.A. Hanks)

E.A. Hanks has no memory of an intact family, only of living as a child of divorce in Sacramento, visiting her increasingly famous father—who dropped out of college and moved away in 1977 to pursue acting as a career—on weekend trips to L.A. At home, however, her mother Susan Dillingham’s undiagnosed mental illness (most likely, Hanks opines in the book, bipolar disorder) created an ever more staggering level of instability.

“I lived in a white house with columns, a backyard with a pool, and a bedroom with pictures of horses plastered on every wall,” Hanks writes in The 10, in a concise passage brimming with Didion-esque descriptive and emotional exactitude. “As the years went on, the backyard became so full of dog shit that you couldn’t walk around it, and the house stank of smoke. The fridge was bare or full of expired food more often than not, and my mother spent more and more time in her big four-poster bed, poring over her Bible. 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, when teen herd dynamics are at their most brutal.”

The author (at right) with her father Tom Hanks, stepmother Rita Wilson and brother Colin Hanks at the 2020 Golden Globe Awards (Photo by Sthanlee B. Mirador/Sipa USA/Newscom)

The narrative of The 10 ping-pongs back and forth between Hanks’ early Sacramento childhood, the present-day road trip, and its inspiration, an earlier mother-daughter road trip to Dillingham’s hometown of Palatka, Florida, when Hanks was 14. (Dillingham, whose stage name was Samantha Lewes, died of cancer in 2002.) Along the way, the adult Hanks hopes to discover her mother’s true origin story, to finally separate historical truth from the many layers of “fiction” generated by psychosis. “Her relationship with reality was fluid,” she writes. “There would usually be a grain of truth that was fed through the meat grinder of mental illness and came out the other side sordid and upsetting.”

But the insights she uncovers camping in a van (which she borrowed from her father) across Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Louisiana are far more powerful than mere facts could ever be. This is a poetic, elegiac deconstruction of the miracle of emotional survival, and if Hanks’ connection to a household name gets readers to crack open the book, they’ll stay for the raw power of the narrative’s universal pull. “ ‘What do I have in common with this person? Her dad wins Oscars,’ ” Hanks says of what a book buyer might think. “Then you realize, if you’ve ever loved a complicated person, we have quite a lot in common.”

This is not a memoir of a celebrity childhood, and when papa Hanks makes his occasional appearance, he’s simply the grounded, steady parent. At the same time, Dillingham is far from a monster. There are plenty of harrowing moments—just going to the grocery store with a mother in the grip of a full-blown psychotic episode demonstrates how tense daily life could be—but the adult Hanks is always in control of the narrative, never veering into maudlin as she steers us on a healing journey toward illumination and acceptance. “The biggest gift my dad gave me—outside of, you know, unconditional love and a van—was that when he first read [the book], he said, ‘That is an accurate description of your mother. That is exactly what it was like to love her and to fear her,’ ” Hanks says. And she bounced multiple drafts off brother Colin, who helped her thread the needle on a portrait that was both accurate and humanizing, including the dedicated mom who for years got up at 4 a.m. to drive young Elizabeth to participate in horse shows around the state and the modern mom who helped her daughter dye her hair purple. “For every friend I had who was not allowed to come to my house, I had another for whom my mom was ‘the cool mom,’ ” the memoirist writes in The 10.

Hanks, then 16, with her mother at a horse show in Rancho Murieta in 1998 (Courtesy of E.A. Hanks)

To illustrate just how powerfully supportive her East Sacramento circle was, Hanks shares an anecdote that didn’t make it into the book. One night when she was 11 or 12, her mom—an ardent devotee of AA who had long before battled alcohol and drug addiction—was away at a 12-step meeting. “It was getting later and later, and I was getting really hungry,” Hanks recalls. She knew a mom from school who lived across the street. “Not in the Lady Bird  house, but maybe next door to it,” she notes. “I called her and said, ‘Will you come over and cook me dinner?’ The strangeness of that must have been shocking, but she did. She came over.”

This is why Hanks still comes back to Sacramento regularly to visit the community that helped parent her through adversity. “Even though what was primarily being modeled for me was chaos and dysfunction,” she says, “all around the edges, my stepmother, my brother [Colin], my younger brothers and my East Sacramento coterie of adoptive mothers signaled what family really meant, which was unconditional love and acceptance.”

This week, Hanks returns to her old stomping grounds on the heels of her memoir’s release, reading from The 10 at her favorite local bookstore, Time Tested Books, on April 17 at 7 p.m. She also likes to stop into East Sacramento dive bar Club 2 Me for a whiskey and coke whenever she’s “visiting home,” or grab a sandwich from Corti Brothers. As it turns out, you can take the girl out of Sacramento, but you can’t take Sacramento out of the girl. “When you grow up in a place that takes such good care of you, the way that Sacramento did, that stays with you your whole life,” Hanks says. “It’s what allows you to go off and have adventures.”

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