E.A. Hanks considers Rita Wilson more than a stepmom.
“Rita’s not really a stepmother, she’s my other mother,” Hanks told People Tuesday.
Wilson wed the 42-year-old author’s father, Tom Hanks, in April 1988 — nearly three years after his split from E.A.’s biological mom, Samantha Lewes.
“When I say my parents, I really mean my dad and Rita, because they’ve been together since before I can really remember. They’ve been together since I was 4 or 5,” E.A., short for Elizabeth Anne, added.
Along with E.A., the “Forrest Gump” actor also shares son Colin, 47, with Lewes. He welcomed sons Chester “Chet,” 34, and Truman, 29, with Wilson in the ’90s.
“My younger brothers, I don’t think I’ve ever really referred to them as my half brothers, which I guess they technically are,” E.A. continued. “Because 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.”
“I think we’re all kind of in that era of trying to get our own thing going and individuate and all of that, but we’re a posse,” she added.
Lewes, whose real name was Susan Dillingham, got primary custody of E.A. and Colin after her divorce from Tom. Soon after, the late actress moved her brood from Los Angeles to Sacramento, six hours away from the actor.
E.A. explained in her new book, “The 10,” that she only got to “visit [her] dad and stepmother (and soon enough [her] younger half brothers) on the weekends and during summers” — and had barely any memories of her “parents in the same place at the same time.”
“From 5 to 14, years filled with confusion, violence, deprivation, and love, I was a Sacramento girl,” she wrote.
“I lived in a white house with columns, a backyard with a pool, and a bedroom with pictures of horses plastered on every wall,” she said of her mom’s house in northern California.
However, “as the years went on,” her biological mom’s mental health declined — as did her quality of life.
“The backyard became so full of dog s—t that you couldn’t walk around it, 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 the Bible,” she recalled.
“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.”
The former Vanity Fair writer said the matriarch “pushed me, shook me, pulled at my hair and locked me in a closet once or twice” and told her “there were men hiding in her closet who were waiting for us to go to sleep to come out and do horrible things.”
After the incident, her parents’ “custody arrangement basically switched” and she began living full-time with Tom and Wilson, both 68, while visiting Sacramento “on the weekends and in the summer.”
During her senior year of high school, her mom “called to say she was dying.”
Lewes, who E.A. suspected had undiagnosed bipolar disorder with episodes of extreme paranoia and delusion, died from lung cancer in 2002 at age 49.
Although E.A. went to live in a stable home with her dad and Wilson, she admitted that she struggles with the aftereffects of her “abusive” childhood.
The author said she sometimes struggles to maintain her “personal hygiene,” admitting she went over a decade without seeing a dentist.
“Only sporadically did I ever have an adult telling me to brush my teeth, for example, let alone how or why I should,” she explained.
She also struggles to “keep food in [her] house on a consistent basis” because the shelves were usually barren at her mom’s home.
While her late mother had her fair share of issues, E.A. noted that she showed her love in other ways, such as baking cookies, doing her hair and driving her “all over California to horse shows at ungodly hours.”
“The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road” hit shelves on Tuesday.
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