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Repair common Windows errors and clear accumulated junk for a smoother, more stable PC - no reinstall needed.Free scan · no reinstallE.A. Hanks’s memoir, The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, follows her attempt to understand her late mother, Susan Dillingham, and investigate a disturbing claim she found in her mother’s papers. The account remains unresolved: the book’s reported journey explores what the journal might mean, not proof that the alleged crime occurred.
What is The 10 about?
In The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, E.A. Hanks looks back at her mother’s life while tracing a family mystery. As People’s exclusive, republished by Yahoo Entertainment, reports, Hanks found a red journal among stored family papers roughly a decade after her mother’s death. It contained a shocking claim involving her maternal grandfather, John Raymond Dillingham.
The journal’s statement is an allegation Hanks set out to examine; the available reporting does not establish that the alleged crime happened. The uncertainty is central to the story: Hanks was trying to find a “grain of truth” in what she had discovered and to better understand her mother.
Why did Hanks travel along Interstate 10?
In 2019, Hanks undertook a six-month road trip from Los Angeles toward Palatka, Florida, where her mother’s family had lived. The route gave her a way to investigate the family history while reflecting on her mother’s life. Hanks later described the journey and memoir’s aims in a September 6, 2025, CNN interview.
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Her inquiry did not produce a conclusive answer. An uncle’s recollections were intriguing but did not settle what the journal meant. Hanks also considered whether her mother had been writing about her own experience rather than describing an event she witnessed. Those possibilities should not be mistaken for findings that resolve the allegation.
Independent reader supportYour contribution helps us test, update, and keep practical guides available for everyone.How does the memoir address Hanks’s mother?
The family mystery sits within a broader effort to understand Susan Dillingham and the emotional world Hanks associates with her upbringing. In the CNN interview, Hanks said her mother had no formal diagnosis. Any account of her mental health is therefore Hanks’s retrospective interpretation, not a confirmed medical diagnosis.
Hanks described the book’s wider purpose this way: “If my father’s world is a fantasy and my mother’s world was a nightmare, I think the book is really about trying to ground myself, not only in my reality, but in the larger reality that is America.” The quote captures the memoir’s movement between personal history and a broader reflection on how a person makes sense of the world around them.
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What readers should know about the family mystery
- The memoir is The 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road by E.A. Hanks.
- Its reported narrative includes a six-month drive in 2019 from Los Angeles toward Palatka, Florida.
- The journal contained a claim involving Hanks’s maternal grandfather, but the reporting does not verify that the alleged crime occurred.
- Hanks’s conversations and investigation did not conclusively establish what the journal described.
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