Tom Hanks addresses daughter E.A. Hanks’ memoir about his troubled ex-wife

Tom Hanks is showing support for his daughter.

The Forrest Gump star recently discussed his pride in his daughter, E.A. Hanks, following the release of her book The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, which chronicles her tumultuous childhood with the actor’s first wife, Susan Dillingham.

“She’s a knockout, always has been,” the You’ve Got Mail actor said of his daughter during an interview with Access Hollywood at the red carpet premiere of The Phoenician Scheme. “You know, it’s a pride because I think — she shares it with me. She’s very open about what the process is.”

The elder Hanks went on to explain why he knew his daughter was capable of great achievements from a young age. “If you’ve had kids, you realize that you see who they are when they’re about six weeks old,” he said. “Their personality is on display right there. Their temper, the way they see the world is demonstrated in their body language and on their face.”

Hanks continued, “I’m not surprised that my daughter had the wherewithal as well as the curiosity — as well as, I’m gonna say perhaps a shoot-herself-in-the-foot kind of wherewithal — in order to examine this thing that I think she was incredibly honest about.”

The 10 follows E.A. Hanks’ six-month road trip from Los Angeles to her mother’s family hometown of Palatka, Fla., on Interstate 10. Dillingham died from cancer in 2002, and the author used the trip as an opportunity to investigate her mom’s family history, and discussed her memories of being a child of divorce.

In her an excerpt of her book published by PEOPLE, E.A. Hanks explained that her parents separated when she was a young child. “Eventually a divorce agreement was settled, and I would visit my dad and stepmother (and soon enough my younger half brothers) on the weekends and during summers, but from 5 to 14, years filled with confusion, violence, deprivation, and love, I was a Sacramento girl,” she wrote. (Tom Hanks officially divorced Dillingham in 1987, and married his Volunteers costar Rita Wilson the following year.)

E.A. Hanks, who has worked as a contributor to Vanity Fair and The New York Times, went on to detail the disarray of her mother’s home in California’s capital city. “As the years went on, the backyard became so full of dog s‑‑‑ that you couldn’t walk around it, the house stank of smoke,” she wrote. “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. One night, her emotional violence became physical violence, and in the aftermath I moved to Los Angeles.”

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Elsewhere in the Access Hollywood interview, Tom Hanks praised his daughter for her grace in navigating the world of journalism and publishing bearing his famous surname. “She worked for some international well-known firm, with a copyrighted last name,” the actor said. “She knows that, and she leans into absolutely everything of it, and I think anybody who does that is a bold, journalistic, literate mind, and I’m just thrilled that I can say the safe thing about my daughter.”

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