Hello and welcome to Meet the Writers, I'm Georgina Godwin.
My guest today grew up between Sacramento grit and the glow of Hollywood.
She's the daughter of actor Tom Hanks, but her story is very much her own.
A journalist turned memoirist, she's written for Vanity Fair, The Guardian and The New York Times.
Her debut, The Ten, is a literary road trip into family, history and the landscapes that shaped her.
EA Hanks, welcome.
Thank you for having me.
So you publish as EA Hanks, though you were born Elizabeth Anne.
So I wonder what EA gives you that Elizabeth doesn't.
Is it distance, protection, or just rhythm on the page?
It covers a multitude of needs.
EA came from my time working at the Huffington Post,
which I started off as a secondary reporter at Vanity Fair, mostly doing research for staff writers.
And from there, after a number of years,
I became one of the editors of the front page of the Huffington Post and then sort of became a Jane about town.
I worked on a number of, as we call them, verticals at the time.
What's the vertical?
A vertical was, you know, a section, sort of the living section,
the sports section, the front news section, the blog section, all of these sorts of things.
So I moved around a little bit and I made a point.