One half of the author’s early life was spent with a mother who struggled with addiction, her mental health and caring responsibilities. The other was with her father Tom on film sets and in a house full of love and structure. She discusses her road trip back into her complicated past

When EA Hanks was 14, her mother announced she had bought a Winnebago and they were going to drive across the US in it. It was 1996, and Hanks (her initials stand for Elizabeth Ann), had recently left her mother, Susan, to go to live with her father, the actor Tom Hanks, in Los Angeles. “Things between my mother and I were at an absolute low point,” she says. The drive, she remembers, from California – long hours on the road, her mother chain-smoking and listening to Christian rock music, stopping only to eat and sleep – was “three awkward, silent, painful...