For E.A. Hanks, life was like a box of chocolates.

She never knew what she was going to get when it came to her complicated family—especially when it came to her divorced parents, Tom Hanks and the late Susan Dillingham, who are also parents to Colin Hanks—and it left her with many questions. 

“I once asked my father if I was a ‘save the marriage’ baby,” the 42-year-old—who was born three years before her parents separated—wrote in her new book, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road. “’No,’ he assured me, ‘but you were a ‘someone died and I feel the urge to create life’ baby.'”

According to E.A., Tom explained that they wanted a second baby after Susan lost her father.

“Turns out, after her father’s death, my mother wanted another child,” E.A. wrote. “Without the death of John Raymond Dillingham, I never enter the picture.”

This was just one example of the complexities of E.A.’s childhood. She also explained that her upbringing consisted of bopping from her mother’s house in Sacramento to Tom and Rita Wilson‘s house in Los Angeles for years following her parents’ separation in 1985.  

“I would visit my dad and stepmother (and soon enough my younger half brothers) on the weekends and during summers,” she said. “But from ages five to fourteen, years filled with confusion, violence, deprivation, and love, I was a Sacramento girl.”