Tom Hanks' daughter E.A. opens up about her late mother, Susan Dillingham

Tom Hanks is one of the most famous men in Hollywood and has four children. While we are used to seeing his sons Colin on the big screen and Chet Hanks up to various shenanigans, his only daughter, Elizabeth Ann, who goes by E.A. has stayed relatively out of the spotlight - until now. 

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E.A. has a memoir coming out next week, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, where she explores her late mother's life and the memories they made before she passed at the age of 49 from lung cancer. On Thursday,  PEOPLE shared an excerpt from the book. "From 5 to 14, years filled with confusion, violence, deprivation, and love," E.A. writes.

The 42-year-old is the daughter of Tom and his first wife, Samantha Dillingham, who went by the stage name Samantha Lewes. They were married from 1978 to 1987 after meeting as theater students at Sacramento State University. They also welcomed E.A.'s older brother, Colin, who has followed in Tom's footsteps. 

Lewes had a brief acting career, but following their divorce, E.A. and Colin were raised by their mother, who once worked under the name Samantha Lewes. 

Sharing her story, E.A. writes, “I am a kid from the First (non-famous) Marriage." The only memories she has of her parents in the same place were her and Colin's high school graduation. "I have one picture of me standing between my parents. In it, my mother’s best wig is slightly askew," she writes. 

E.A. was born in Burbank but raised in Sacramento, where life at home was anything but glamorous. “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 recalls. 

But the picture-perfect setting didn’t hold. “The backyard became so full of dog s--- 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 writes.

Though never formally diagnosed, E.A. believes her mother struggled with bipolar disorder. There were episodes of paranoia, emotional outbursts, and eventually, violence. “One night, her emotional violence became physical violence,” she writes. 

That’s when everything changed. She left Sacramento in the middle of seventh grade and moved to Los Angeles full-time, flipping the custody arrangement. Now, she lived with her famous dad—and his new wife, Rita Wilson- and her half-siblings Chet and Truman, and she only saw her mom on weekends and summers.

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In her senior year of high school, she got the call: her mother was dying. Dillingham passed away from lung cancer in 2002 at just 49 years old, leaving behind a daughter still trying to make sense of it all.

A.E. embarked on a six-month road trip on Interstate 10, from L.A. to Palatka, Florida, where her mom’s family had once lived, to discover more about her mom. The result seems like an incredible book, out April 8.