E.A. Hanks, THE 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road
[0:00]Hi, this is Zibi Owens, and you're listening to Totally Book to Zibi.
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[0:45]EA Hanks is the author of The Ten, and then more of Family and the Open Road.
[0:50]EA Hanks lives in Los Angeles, California, formerly a staffer at Vanity Fair.
[0:55]She has contributed to Time, The Guardian, The New York Times, and others.
[0:59]Welcome, Elizabeth.
[1:00]Thank you so much for coming on to talk about The Ten, and then more of Family and the
[1:05]Open Road Congrats.
[1:06]Oh, thank you so much.
[1:07]I appreciate it.
[1:08]This is my very first interview.
[1:09]Oh, my gosh.
[1:10]Well, this will be easy because it's not formal at all, and you just chitchat, and, you know,
[1:15]I just, you know, you can ease me in.
[1:19]I'm used to being on that side of the conversation, so this is a nice, I feel, yeah.
[1:23]This is a safe space, I appreciate it.
[1:25]I love this.
[1:26]It's usually make mine first for people because it's so gentle, and I'm just here to
[1:31]boost and have no agenda other than we love.
[1:33]We love a soft landing.
[1:36]Exactly.
[1:37]I opened the book and, like, immediately laughed because, Moomat, I didn't even know
[1:42]how to pronounce it.
[1:43]I, you know, my bookstores in Santa Monica, your guess isn't as good as anybody who looks
[1:47]like us.
[1:48]Yeah, for sure.
[1:49]So, the book opens there, which is, like, a turn off when you're on ocean in Santa
[1:54]Monica, when you turn the sign, I always wonder, like, what is that?
[1:59]And you go in that, and that is just the tip of the iceberg of things you might wonder
[2:05]and that we learned through your story.
[2:07]Yeah.
[2:08]That was Moomanahiko for people who don't live in Los Angeles or in Santa Monica.
[2:14]As you said, it's a small access road that essentially kind of feeds into the Pacific Coast
[2:20]Highway right where the Pacific Coast Highway veers inland and eventually becomes
[2:25]Interstate 10.
[2:27]And I, just like you, had never, like, truly the name of the chapters who the hell is
[2:34]Moomanahiko, because that was the question that kind of prompted at all.
[2:39]And I have to say that the reveal did not disappoint, not for me.
[2:44]There's a number of big questions I have in this book that do not have clean cut answers,
[2:50]but I'm happy to say that the book starts at least with one.
[2:52]Yes.
[2:53]That was very, very satisfying to know, um, yeah, Tonga people who live there, right?
[2:58]Yes.
[2:59]Yeah.
[3:00]The indigenous tribes of Southern California include the Tongva and the two mash, and
[3:04]they're the language of the Tongua with Shoshan and it turns out that Moomanahiko is
[3:09]indeed Shoshan for breath of the ocean, which, you know, that's a good name for a road.
[3:16]I'll take it.
[3:17]There was going to be a road name that that's the road, like sloping down to there you
[3:22]get.
[3:23]So it's like, it's better.
[3:24]It's certainly more poetic than the 10, which by the way, I didn't realize I got
[3:28]pinged in, in a review for even the title giving away that I'm from Los Angeles, because
[3:33]it's called the 10, I apparently, you know, I'm straight out of an SNL skit.
[3:38]You know, I, I took the PC H to the 10 to the 101 to the 405 and then went back to the
[3:44]10.
[3:45]Got a book deal out of it.
[3:47]There you go.
[3:48]The best thing to come out of the 10, perhaps.
[3:50]Exactly.
[3:51]Well, first of all, thank you for taking me across the country and to places I had never
[3:56]been and had always wondered about, even places I probably should have been by now, like
[4:00]Santa Fe, why have I not been there.
[4:01]Anyway, just all sorts of stops where you give us introductions to local characters,
[4:09]topography, descriptions, your own experience, some really funny things that happened to you
[4:15]along the way.
[4:17]But at the end of it, like, you really put the book down feeling as if you've gone on this
[4:23]journey, which most of us are never going to do.
[4:26]So thank you for bringing us along and like your, you know, van that had that funny name that
[4:31]I can't remember.
[4:32]Minnie, the van Minnie, yes, many, many.
[4:36]That brings me such joy.
[4:37]I mean, I think the, the story of a road trip is an American story, right?
[4:42]We are blessed with space.
[4:44]I remember when I moved to Scotland and I, I mentioned just for an academic year and
[4:51]some a little time before and behind.
[4:53]But I remember saying to someone, God, the sky seems so big here.
[4:58]Like everything feels like it's on, you know, a really such a huge scale.
[5:03]And the person just laughed in my face and it's like, do you know how small this country
[5:06]is, especially in comparison to yours?
[5:09]And I think Americans really don't understand that most countries have one, maybe two
[5:15]large cities, America has more large cities than we know what to do with, right?
[5:20]And the trope of the American road trip is I think that's kind of, you know, if you've ever
[5:26]listened to a Bruce Springsteen song, you know that if you've got big feelings, you can
[5:30]get in your car and literally navigate them.
[5:34]So I think one of the things that I hope that people do after they read the 10 is go
[5:39]for a drive.
[5:40]It doesn't have to be a seven month journey across the continental U.S. but good things
[5:47]can happen when you get in your car and let yourself think long thoughts.
[5:51]It was interesting how you decided to do this by yourself and how immediately people were
[5:55]like, oh my gosh, is that safe?
[5:58]Are you going to be okay?
[5:59]Right.
[6:00]You know, you're encouraging people to do it and yet I feel like there is this fear that
[6:03]of course is along with it, the lone woman traveler.
[6:07]Yes.
[6:08]Yeah.
[6:09]Well, as I say in the book, there was a really fascinating sort of gender divide in the
[6:15]responses to when people, because what basically I told people that I was moving into
[6:20]a van and I was going to take my sweet time driving from California to Florida roughly
[6:26]on the same sort of schedule and journey as the one my mother and I took.
[6:31]And yeah, women, their first instinct was fear, which makes sense.
[6:37]And I have to say more perplexing was men's response on jealousy, which is slightly concerning.
[6:44]Nonbinary folk have not voted as of yet, which I think, you know, speaks to their wisdom.
[6:49]So it was really fascinating kind of navigating other other people's feelings about what
[6:55]I was doing, whether that was navigating other people's fear or navigating people's
[7:00]sort of envy.
[7:02]And I found that they were both right.
[7:05]There were times where it was smart to be afraid and there were times where I woke up
[7:11]with deep gratitude about what I was experiencing and feeling like I wish everyone had
[7:17]a window of this, the opportunity, the time, the invitation to get lost.
[7:22]It is amazing how much people show you about themselves just and how they respond to something
[7:27]about you.
[7:28]I mean, if you would like to know about anyone's marriage, tell them you're getting divorced
[7:32]because, oh my gosh, I got a lot of feedback and yeah, oh, I'm sure.
[7:38]I mean, I, I, there's a running joke amongst my friends amongst whom I would say I'm one of
[7:44]the more therapy eyes gratefully, but I always like to say like, oh, your, your psychology
[7:49]is showing like your, your trauma, your deals, your, your unresolved patterns are showing.
[7:56]And that was never more evident to me when I was walking through because, you know, there
[8:02]were people who love me and people who want me to do well and succeed who really cautioned
[8:08]against this adventure for many different reasons.
[8:12]And I think one of the things that, you know, you are rooted in your own perspective.
[8:16]So you have to get curious about other people's feelings about what you're doing.
[8:21]And I just found that there is a deep concern about waking sleeping dogs and not letting
[8:29]them lay, lie, news, all of those things.
[8:33]Yeah.
[8:34]I'm glad you brought up sleeping dogs because I think that the pit bull section was one
[8:38]of my favorites in the book.
[8:39]Even though it was such a small sliver of the story, I feel like it represents so much
[8:46]more.
[8:47]You find this dog, you want to care for it, you're afraid to let it go.
[8:51]You want to, you'd think consider adopting it even though it makes like literally no sense
[8:55]at all.
[8:56]Yeah.
[8:57]You know, and don't, I feel like we all have those instincts, right?
[9:00]Like, oh, I need to save this.
[9:02]I need to help with this and it must be in my path so that I can do something like you
[9:06]in the dog and like journal, right?
[9:09]Like you must be charged with doing something.
[9:12]And then at the end of the day, you have to say, okay, well, now I'm going to put it down
[9:15]and I'm going to leave it in good hands, which is almost like this book in our hands
[9:19]and just, or John.
[9:20]Yeah.
[9:21]It feels like the dog, the dog, the, you know, the story kind of has a bow on it in the
[9:30]book.
[9:31]But if I start thinking about that dog now, I will start to cry, like it's a given.
[9:37]And all of the things that that dog represented for me on the trip, but then in the scope
[9:42]of my life, right, sometimes you're just presented with the perfect manifestation, the
[9:47]perfect metaphor for what it is that you're dealing with.
[9:51]And I think if you grow up with an addict parent or a mentally ill parent or any sort
[9:58]of figure that is.
[10:00]is limited in their ability to care for you
[10:03]by forces beyond their control,
[10:05]like way beyond their control.
[10:07]You grow up with a very complicated relationship
[10:11]to what care looks like
[10:13]and what love and support look like.
[10:15]And I say something in the book along the lines of,
[10:17]you know, there's plenty of people
[10:19]who grew up with addict parents
[10:20]whose problems go on to be the same addictions, right?
[10:24]The same drugs of choice as they would say
[10:27]in the program, you're DOC.
[10:29]But for me, that has always been loving the damage
[10:35]or loving the unavailable or loving the absent.
[10:39]And that dog was like,
[10:42]okay, you think you've done all the work?
[10:44]You think you've done enough therapy,
[10:46]you think you're ready to move on.
[10:48]Let's test this.
[10:49]Let's see, let's see how good you are
[10:51]at setting down the struggles that are not yours to fight.
[10:55]And it was one of the hardest things I've ever done.
[10:58]And the descriptions of me crying in front of Texans
[11:02]on the Friday before a holiday, you know,
[11:04]I pay some lip service to how awkward it was.
[11:07]It was mortifying.
[11:09]And it was absolutely mortifying
[11:12]to be clearly having some sort of personal moment
[11:15]in front of a series of, you know,
[11:18]people just trying to get on to their four day,
[11:20]their three day weekend.
[11:21]So that the, I'm glad to hear that it resonated with you
[11:25]because it's still resonating with me.
[11:28]Yeah.
[11:29]Oh my gosh.
[11:30]Well, also, the stories you tell about growing up
[11:34]with your mother and as you traverse the country,
[11:36]we learn more and more about her,
[11:38]about her relationship.
[11:39]She gets progressively ill and the narrative
[11:41]as you get further east and in your drive.
[11:45]You know, we get to some of the bigger, not bigger,
[11:48]but the moments where you end up having to change custody
[11:52]as a result of her sort of dissociative states,
[11:55]I would say, or more aggressive moments.
[11:59]And how you are trying to understand
[12:03]even how that happened to her in a very,
[12:06]I feel like sympathetic way by trying to learn more
[12:09]about her family, which you didn't know about and all of that.
[12:11]So tell me like, what was that, what was the goal?
[12:14]And did you feel like you accomplished the goal
[12:17]in terms of your relationship with her?
[12:19]Yeah, anybody who has buried a loved one knows
[12:23]what that, how the conversation becomes one-sided, right?
[12:28]And I talked to my mom all the time.
[12:31]I have ever since she passed.
[12:33]And it's a one-sided conversation
[12:35]with the idea of my mom on a good day,
[12:41]no point trying to talk to her on a bad day,
[12:43]but trying to talk to her on a good day.
[12:45]And so it became this sort of running dialogue
[12:49]that is part of how I navigate the world.
[12:52]It's part of how I process what it is that's happening to me.
[12:56]I talk about it with my mom.
[12:58]And in the process of finding her journals and her poetry,
[13:02]it started to feel like it was returning
[13:05]to a two-way conversation because I was reading poetry
[13:10]that I knew that she wrote when she was alive when I was a kid,
[13:14]but I never had access to.
[13:17]And using my professional skills to edit her
[13:22]and to take her seriously as an artist,
[13:25]became this new facet to our relationship.
[13:29]And I joke that it was going to experience
[13:31]that my mom ever had when she was alive,
[13:33]which was being taken seriously as an artist,
[13:35]and certainly being taken seriously as a writer.
[13:38]And I talk at length about the limits of her writing
[13:42]and of her talent.
[13:43]But I think the way that I made peace
[13:46]with disturbing her peace was to approach her work
[13:52]with respect.
[13:54]And I think that the,
[13:57]if I had written the book 10 years after she died
[14:00]or five years after she died,
[14:03]would be a completely different thing, right?
[14:05]Because I would be in a completely different splash zone
[14:08]of grief, but 20 years on,
[14:11]20 years of processing and therapy and grief
[14:15]and doing the work meant that I could come to her poetry,
[14:20]which is sometimes really lovely,
[14:23]is sometimes really disturbing.
[14:26]It meant that I had enough space to focus on the writing
[14:30]as writing and not as receipts of my abuse.
[14:34]And one of the things that's really fascinating about this,
[14:37]this really tender time,
[14:40]where the book stops being mine,
[14:42]because this has been,
[14:44]by the time the book comes out,
[14:45]it will have been 10 years of work,
[14:47]10 years of having the idea of five years of it being a book
[14:51]that was sold to a publisher before I left on the trip.
[14:53]One of the great things about this time
[14:56]where it goes from being mine and goes out into the world
[14:59]and people who I don't know are reading it,
[15:03]is that they're being introduced to my mom.
[15:06]And I get to see her through their eyes.
[15:12]And that's like someone coming into your adolescent bedroom.
[15:16]And seeing what posters are on the wall
[15:18]and where in the room to do hide your diary
[15:21]and whatever else you've hidden in your teenage bedroom.
[15:26]And I think of all the things,
[15:29]you asked if I feel successful.
[15:32]When I showed the book to my dad,
[15:34]which was obviously a heavy moment for both of us,
[15:40]the first thing he said to me was,
[15:43]that is the description of the woman that I knew.
[15:46]And when you're dealing with someone who lived in hyperbole,
[15:50]whose entire sort of coping mechanism was built in extreme
[15:56]to deliver the readers an accurate description of that person.
[16:00]And an accurate description of my deep ambivalence,
[16:02]as in my deep love for her and my deep fear of her,
[16:06]to know that the other people who were most closely entwined
[16:10]with her feel that it was accurate and loving,
[16:15]which I think is an important combination.
[16:17]And that to me is the wind.
[16:19]So I feel like I succeeded in connecting with my mother
[16:23]in a way that readers can appreciate.
[16:25]I think so if only because given how I grew up
[16:29]and how she raised me and her relationship with the truth,
[16:32]which mangled my ability to tell the truth
[16:36]and to think truthfully as a kid,
[16:39]that to me is a big wind for sure.
[16:42]Yeah, wow.
[16:43]That must be so satisfying.
[16:45]That's wonderful.
[16:46]Yeah, I think it's satisfying in that there's peace
[16:52]with the lack of resolution, right?
[16:55]There's, who has a resolved relationship with their mother?
[16:59]Right.
[17:00]Yeah, exactly.
[17:01]Dead or alive.
[17:03]Okay, precisely.
[17:04]But do I feel like I've gotten pretty dang close?
[17:08]Yeah, I think I have.
[17:10]But grief is ongoing.
[17:13]I'm 20 years deep since my mom died
[17:18]and my relationship.
[17:19]But I still have days where I wake up
[17:21]and miss the best version of her.
[17:24]For sure.
[17:25]Yeah, of course.
[17:26]I mean, you mentioned in the book
[17:28]some of the lasting impacts of her influence essentially
[17:32]and some of the sort of death, not deficits,
[17:35]but some of the things about yourself
[17:38]that you know have come as a result of that.
[17:40]Yeah.
[17:40]You talk about the, you know, truth telling,
[17:42]but you wasn't talking about specific things
[17:44]like not having food in the fridge
[17:46]or other ways where you see it play out.
[17:50]Yeah.
[17:51]How do you see it play out now,
[17:52]even after all the therapy and all the work and everything?
[17:55]This is such a perfectly timed question
[17:58]because I'm struggling right now.
[18:00]And I know a lot of people are
[18:02]because we're being overwhelmed with world events,
[18:06]local events, personal events.
[18:08]And just this week, I was talking with my partner
[18:12]about how my most wobbly dominoes are falling right now.
[18:17]So I don't have enough food in my fridge right now
[18:21]when lunch is a rolled up tortilla,
[18:24]because that's what's around.
[18:26]I know that my sort of the fingerprints
[18:29]of my childhood are rearing their ugly head.
[18:31]So there are things that I have managed to,
[18:35]I think in the book I describe it too,
[18:37]when you first start driving,
[18:39]everything is really mannered, right?
[18:40]You're like, first I put on my seatbelt.
[18:43]Next I check my mirrors.
[18:44]Like because you've never done it before,
[18:47]it feels all very rehearsed and very mindful
[18:50]and very specific.
[18:51]And when I'm struggling,
[18:53]like I'm struggling a bit right now,
[18:55]I have to be, things have to get so small.
[18:58]It has to be first I make my bed before I do anything else.
[19:02]Then I brush my teeth before I leave the bedroom,
[19:05]because if I come downstairs without those things done,
[19:08]if they're gonna get done,
[19:09]they're not gonna get done till 230 now, right?
[19:12]I have to have a standing grocery delivery to make sure.
[19:17]So there's all these sort of like,
[19:18]I think the difference is is that I have,
[19:21]first of all, I call it minding the gap.
[19:23]You know, when you, the gap between the trigger
[19:26]and becoming aware of the trigger,
[19:28]the gap has gotten very small for me.
[19:30]So when I know like, man, yesterday, I had some oatmeal,
[19:35]some crackers, a rolled up tortilla,
[19:37]and like half a can of Amy's instant soup.
[19:41]Like that, I can see like, oh, okay,
[19:45]things are starting to happen in my unconscious.
[19:49]I, you know, like when you're like a duck on the water,
[19:52]or you know, everything's kind of smooth up top,
[19:55]but underneath, there's a lot of work happening.
[19:57]So it's still there.
[20:00]You know, I'm still, I still struggle with the things I talk about in the book, not having the muscle memory of having constant access to food, not having the support network or the, you know, when you, when you, when you grow up in a, in a regulated house, I mean, emotionally regulated house, you are taught as a child to have routine, so that it becomes habit.
[20:25]I'm still on the point where I have to work on the routine and things have to get very specific and mindful. So, you know, I'm still in it. I'm still there and I'm still working on it. That is, that's the process and I'm still in process with those things, especially when things get stressful and overwhelming, for sure.
[20:48]Well, to know that about yourself and be able to articulate it like that is a gift. Is there is, what is, I mean, you don't have to share the lovely dominoes, is there one worth sharing that is making you feel a little destabilized and does the book coming out make that better or worse?
[21:07]Yeah, I would say that the, you know, one of my, one of my very good friends when she read the book, she said to me, you know, there's, there's stuff in here that I don't know.
[21:18]And I've known you for a very long time. And one of them was that I struggle with a skin discoriation disorder, which is picking, pathologically picking at your skin until you are bleeding or you wound or you scar yourself.
[21:35]And I said, you know, the only thing that I'm scared is in the book is the picking because everything else I've got, that's in the book. I have a handle on everything else in the book. I'm willing to discuss at length because it's
[21:52]while always in process. I'm over the hump, right? Like there's, there's a degree of processing that has happened. But for me, the picking is something that I am not over the hump on.
[22:04]I'm on the near side of the hill.
[22:07]And when I'm really stressed, and I can tell that it's starting to literally show up on my body. That's a pretty clear sign to me that I'm struggling and that I need to talk to my therapist. I need to share with my partner.
[22:24]I need to call up a friend and see who has the bandwidth to listen to a two minute vent. You know, and I think that the, I think you can't go through life without wobbly dominoes.
[22:37]You're just blessed if you can clock them. If you know what they are, and you can kind of use them as the canary in the coal mine. And certainly that for me is the most glaring sign of the struggle bus heat net.
[22:56]You know, your expressions are so poetic. I hope you realize that. Oh, after the fact. I mean, it's like, I feel like I'm like, how do I highlight something that is happening in speech in real time as like I need it.
[23:08]There needs to be like a screen grab a quote grab of, you know, zoom or reality or something.
[23:15]Yeah.
[23:17]Real time transcription. Yeah, something like that. You must notate your books quite a bit. You must have strong marginalia game. You've, I don't. I dog year. I that's so I dog year whenever something strikes me and then I go back and if I can figure out what it was.
[23:34]Yeah, that sounds very familiar. Yeah, love love to dog year. Well, Elizabeth, I really appreciate you sharing being so open, not just with me today, but with the whole book and the whole story because it helps others open up their pasts and examine them and find ways to process and make our way through as you said, it's something everybody works through in their own ways.
[24:04]Yeah, thank you so much. It was really, really a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. I think our, I think increasingly our most precious resources time.
[24:14]So I appreciate yours very much. Oh, thank you so much. All right. Good luck with all your lunch.
[24:20]Thank you so much. Take care. Okay. Thank you for listening to totally booked with Zibi, formerly momstone have time to read books. If you loved the show, tell a friend, leave a review, follow me on Instagram at Zibi Owens and spread the word. Thanks so much. Oh, and by the books.