Zibby chats with Vanity Fair and New York Times contributor E. A. Hanks about her sparkling, heartfelt, poetic new memoir, THE 10: A Memoir of Family and the Open Road, which follows her solo, cross-country journey across the American southwest. E. A. Hanks shares the inspiration behind the road trip and then delves into her complex relationship with her mother, whose journals and poetry become part of the emotional terrain of the book. She also talks about grief, identity, navigating trauma, and the ongoing effects of her unconventional childhood.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Elizabeth. Thank you so much for coming on to talk about The 10, A Memoir of Family and the Open Road.

Congrats. 

Elizabeth: Thank you so much. I appreciate it. This is my very first interview. 

Zibby: Oh my gosh. This'll be easy because it's not formal at all. We just chitchat and I just, regular conversation. 

Elizabeth: That's you. You can ease me in. I'm used to being on that side of the conversation, so this is a nice, I feel.

Zibby: Yeah. 

Elizabeth: This is a safe space. I appreciate it. 

Zibby: Publicists usually make mine first for people because it's so gentle and I'm just here to boost and have no agenda other than we love. 

Elizabeth: We love, we love a soft landing. 

Zibby: Exactly. I opened the book and like immediately laughed because Moomat Ahiko, I don't even know how to pronounce it.

I, my bookstores in Santa Monica,.. 

Elizabeth: Your guess is as good as anybody who looks like us. Yeah, for sure. 

Zibby: So the book opens there, which is like a turnoff when you're on ocean in Santa Monica when you turn and the Sinai, I always wonder what is that? And you go in that, and that is just the beginning.

That's just the tip of the iceberg of things you might wonder and that we learned through your story. 

Elizabeth: Yeah, that was Moomat Ahiko. For people who don't live in Los Angeles or in Santa Monica, as you said, is a small access road that essentially feeds into the Pacific Coast Highway, right where the Pacific Coast Highway veers inland and eventually becomes Interstate 10.

And I just you had never like truly the name of the chapter is, who the Hell is Moomat Ahiko? Because that was the question that kind of prompted it all. I and I have to say that the reveal did not disappoint, not for me. There's a number, there's a number of big questions I have in this book that do not have clean cut answers, but I'm happy to say that the book starts at least with one.

Zibby: Yes. That was very satisfying to know. Yeah. Tonga, people who live there, right? 

Elizabeth: Yes. Yeah. The indigenous tribes of Southern California include the Tonga and the Two Mash, and their the language of the Tonga was Shoshone, and it turns out that Moomat Ahiko is indeed Shoshone for breath. Of the ocean, which, that's a good name for a road.

Zibby: I'll take it. If there was gonna be a road name that, that's the road like Sloofing down. So there you go. 

Elizabeth: Precisely. It's better. It's certainly more poetic than the 10, which, by the way, I didn't realize I got pinged in a review for even the title giving away that I'm from Los Angeles. Because it's called the 10.

I apparently it, I'm straight out of an SNL skit. I took, I, I took the PCH to the 10, to the 1 0 1, to the 4 0 5. 

Zibby: Yeah. 

Elizabeth: And then I went back to the 10, got a book deal out of it. 

Zibby: There you go. The best thing to come out of the 10, perhaps. 

Elizabeth: Exactly. Exactly. 

Zibby: First of all, thank you for taking me across the country into places I had never been, and had always wondered about even places I probably should have been by now, like Santa Fe. Why have I not been there? Anyway, just all sorts of stops where you give us introductions to local characters, topography descriptions, your own experience, some really funny things that happened to you along the way, and some scary things that happened to you along the way. But at the end of it, you really put the book down feeling as if you've gone on this journey, which most of us are never gonna do. So thank you for bringing us along and like your van that had that funny name that I can't remember, mini. 

Elizabeth: The Van Mini. Yeah. 

Zibby: Yes. Mini. Mini. 

Elizabeth: That brings me such joy. I think the the story of a road trip is an American story, right?

We are blessed with space. I remember when I moved to Scotland. And I'm, I mentioned just for an academic year and some, a little time before and behind. But I remember saying to someone, God, the sky seems so big here. Everything feels like it's on, a really such a huge scale.

And the person just laughed in my face and I was like, do you know how small this country is? And especially in comparison to yours. And I think Americans really don't understand that most countries have one maybe two large cities. America has more large cities than we know what to do with. And the trope of the American Road trip is, I think that's if you've ever listened to a Bruce Springsteen song.

You know that if you've got big feelings, you can get in your car and literally navigate them. So I think one of the things that I hope that people do after they read the 10 is go for a drive. It doesn't have to be a seventh month journey across the continental us, but good things can happen when you get in your car and let yourself think long thoughts.

Zibby: It was interesting how you decided to do this by yourself and how immediately people were like, oh my gosh. Is that safe? Are you gonna be okay? You're encouraging people to do it and yet I feel like there is this fear that courses along with it, the lone woman traveler and 

Elizabeth: Yes.

Yeah. 

Zibby: All of that. 

Elizabeth: As I say in the book, there's there was a really, I. Fascinating sort of gender divide in the responses to when people, 'cause what basically I told people was I was moving into a van and I was gonna take my sweet time driving from California to Florida roughly on the same sort of schedule and journey as the one my mother and I took.

And yeah, women, their first instinct was fear. Which makes sense and I have to say more perplexing was men's response on of jealousy, which is slightly concerning. Non-binary folk have not voted as of yet, which I think, speaks to their wisdom. So it was really fascinating navigating other people's feelings about what I was doing, whether that was navigating other people's fear or navigating people's sort of envy, and I found that they were both right. It, there were times where it was smart to be afraid, and there was, there were times where I woke up with deep gratitude about what I was experiencing and feeling I wish everyone had a window of this the opportunity, the time, the invitation to get lost. 

Zibby: It is amazing how much people show you about themselves just in how they respond to something about you. Oh, if you would like to know about anyone's marriage, tell them you're getting divorced.

Because, oh my gosh, I got a lot of feedback at that. 

Elizabeth: I, yeah. Oh, I'm sure. My I, there's a running joke amongst my friends. A amongst whom I would say I'm one of the more, the eyes gratefully, but I always like to say oh, you're. Your psychology is showing, right? It's like your trauma, your deals, your un, your unresolved patterns are showing.

And that was never more evident to me when I was walking through because, there were people who love me and people who want me to do well and succeed, who really cautioned against this adventure for many different reasons. And I think one of the things that, you are rooted in your own perspective.

So you have to get curious about other people's feelings about what you're doing, and I just found that there is a deep concern about waking, sleeping dogs and not letting them lay lie news all of those things. 

Zibby: Yeah. I'm glad you brought up sleeping dogs because I think that the pit bull section was one of my favorites in the book.

Even though it was such a small sliver of the giant story, I feel like it represents so much more. You find this dog, you wanna care for it, you're. Afraid to let it go. You want, you'd consider adopting it even though it makes like literally no sense at all. Yeah, and and don't, I feel like we all have those instincts, right?

Oh, I need to save this, I need to help with this, and it must be in my path so that I can do something like you and the dog and like your mom's journal, right? Like you must be charged with doing something and then at the end of the day you have to say. Okay, now I'm gonna put it down and I'm gonna leave it in good hands, which is almost like this book in our hands and just, or on. 

Elizabeth: Yeah, it feels the dog, that dog, I like, the story kind of has a bow on it in the book, but if I start thinking about that dog now, I will start to cry. Like it it's a given and all of the things that dog represented for me on the trip, but then in the scope of my life, right? Sometimes you're just presented with the perfect manifestation. The perfect metaphor for what it is that you're dealing with.

And I think if you grow up with an addict parent or a mentally ill parent or any sort of figure that is limited in their ability to care for you by forces beyond their control, like way beyond their control. You grow up with a very complicated relationship to what care looks like and what love and support look like.

And I say something in the book along the lines of, there's plenty of people who grew up with addict parents whose problems go on to be the same addictions, right? The same drugs of choice as they would say in the program, your DOC, but for me, that has always been loving the damaged or loving the unavailable or loving the absent, and that dog was like, okay, you think you've done all the work? You think you've done enough therapy? You think you're ready to move on? Let's test this. Let's see. Let's see how good you are at setting down the struggles that are not yours to fight. And it was one of the hardest things I've ever done, and in the descriptions of me crying in front of Texans on the Friday before a holiday, I pay some lip service to how awkward it was.

It was mortifying. It was absolutely mortifying to be clearly having some sort of personal moment in front of a series of people just trying to get onto their four day, their three day weekend. So that the I'm glad to hear that it resonated with you because it's still resonating with me.

Zibby: Yeah. 

Oh my gosh. Also the stories you tell about growing up with your mother and as you traverse the country, we learn more and more about her relationship. She gets progressively ill in the narrative as you get further east in, in your drive. Yeah. Until, we get to some of the bigger.

Not bigger, but the moments where you end up having to change custody as a result of her sort of dissociative states, I would say, or her. 

Elizabeth: Yeah. 

Zibby: More aggressive moments. And how you are trying to understand. Even how that happened to her in a very, I feel sympathetic way by trying to learn more about her family, which she didn't know about and all of that.

So tell me like, what was that, what was the goal and did you feel like you accomplished the goal in terms of your relationship with her? 

Elizabeth: Yeah. Anybody who has buried a loved one knows what that, how the conversation becomes one sided, right? And. I talk to my mom all the time I have ever since she passed.

And it's a one-sided conversation with the idea of my mom on a good day. No point trying to talk to her on a bad day. But trying to talk to her on a good day. And so it be, it became this sort of running dialogue that is. Part of how I navigate the world, it's part of how I, process what it is that's happening to me.

I talk about it with my mom, and in the process of finding her journals and her poetry, it started to feel like it was returning to a two-way conversation because I was reading poetry that I knew that she wrote when she was alive, when I was a kid, but I never had access to, and using my professional skills to edit her and to take her seriously as an artist became this new facet to our relationship.

And I, I don't think it was an experience that my mom ever had when she was alive, which was being taken seriously as an artist. And certainly being taken seriously as a writer. And I talk at length about the limits of her writing and of her talent. But I think the way that I made peace with disturbing her peace was to approach her work with respect.

And I think that the, if I had written a book, 10 years after she died, or five years after she died, it would be a completely different thing, right? Because I'm, I would be in a completely different splash zone of grief, but 20 years on, 20 years of processing and therapy and grief and doing the work meant that I could come to her poetry, which is sometimes really lovely.

Is sometimes really disturbing. It meant that I had enough space to focus on the writing as writing and not as receipts of my abuse. And one of the things that's really fascinating about this really tender time where the book stops being mine, because this has been, by the time the book comes out, it will have been 10 years.

Of work, 10 years of having the idea, five years of it being a book that was sold to a publisher before I left on the trip. One of the great things about this time where it goes from being mine and goes out into the world and people who I don't know are reading it, is that they're being introduced to my mom and I get to see her through their eyes.

And that's like someone coming into your adolescent bedroom, right? And seeing what posters are on the wall and where in the room did you hide your diary and whatever else you've hidden in your teenage bedroom. And I think of all the things, you asked if I feel successful when I showed the book to my dad, which was obviously a heavy moment. For both of us. The first thing he said to me was, that is a description of the woman that I knew. And when you're dealing with someone who lived in hyperbole, whose entire sort of coping me mechanism was built in extreme. To deliver the readers an accurate description of that person and an accurate description of my deep ambivalence, as in my deep love for her and my deep fear of her to know that the other people who were most closely entwined with her feel that it was accurate.

And loving, which I think is an important combination. That to me is the wind. So I do, I feel like I succeeded in connecting with my mother in a way that readers can appreciate. I think so, if only because given how I grew up and how she raised me and her relationship with the truth, which mangled my ability to tell the truth and to think truthfully as a kid, that to me is a big win for sure.

Zibby: Wow. That must be so satisfying. That's wonderful. 

Elizabeth: Yeah. I think, the it's satisfying in that there's there's peace with the lack of resolution, right? 

Zibby: Yep. 

Elizabeth: There's, who has a resolved relationship with their mother, right? 

Zibby: Yeah, exactly. 

Elizabeth: Dead or alive. 

Zibby: That's right. 

Elizabeth: Precisely. But do I feel like I've gotten.

Pretty dang close. Yeah I think I have, but it, grief is ongoing. I'm 20 years, 20 years deep since my mom died and my relation, but I still have days where I wake up and miss the best version of her, for sure. 

Zibby: Yeah, of course. 

Elizabeth: Yeah. 

Zibby: No. Can you not, you mentioned in the book some of the lasting impacts of her influence essentially, and some of the sort of def, not deficits, but some of the things about yourself that you know have come as a result of that.

Yeah. You talk about the, truth telling, but you also talk about specific things like not having food in the fridge or other ways where you see it play out. Yeah. How do you see it play out now, even after all the therapy and all the work and everything? 

Elizabeth: This is such a perfectly timed question because I'm struggling right now and I know a lot of people are because we're being overwhelmed with world events, local events, personal events. And just this week I was talking with my partner about how my most wobbly dominoes are falling right now. So I don't have enough food in my fridge right now when lunches are rolled up, tortilla. Because that's what's around, I know that my, sort of the fingerprints of my childhood are rearing their ugly head.

So there are things that I have managed to, I think in the book, I describe it to, when you first start driving, everything is really mannered, right? You're like, first I put on my seatbelt. Next I check my mirrors. Because you've never done it before. It feels all very rehearsed and very mindful and very specific.

When I'm struggling, like I'm struggling a bit right now, I have to be, I things have to get so small. It has to be first I make my bed before I do anything else. Then I brush my teeth before I leave the bedroom because if I come downstairs without those things done. If they're gonna get done, they're not gonna get done till 2:30 now.

I have to have a standing grocery delivery to make sure. So there's all these sort of I think the differences is that I have, first of all, I call it minding the gap. When you the gap between the trigger and becoming aware of the trigger. 

The gap has gotten very small for me.

So when I know man, yesterday. Yesterday I had some oatmeal, some crackers, a rolled up tortilla, and half a can of Amy's instant soup like that. I can see oh, okay, things are starting to happen in my unconscious. I, like when you're like a duck on the water, know everything's smooth up top, but underneath there's a lot of work happening.

So I. It's still there. 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 when you're, when you grow up in a regulated house emotionally regulated house, you are taught as a child to have routine so that it becomes habit.

I'm still in the point where I have to work on the routine and things have to get very specific and mindful. I'm still in it. I'm they're 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.

Zibby: To know that about yourself and be able to articulate it like that is a gift. 

Elizabeth: Yeah. 

Zibby: Is there is what is, you don't have to share the wobbly 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? 

Elizabeth: Yeah, I would say that the one of my, one of my very good friends when she read the book, she said to me, there's stuff in here that I don't know. And I've known you for a very long time. And one of them was that I struggle with skin discoloration disorder, which is picking, pathologically picking at your skin until you are bleeding or you wound, or you scar yourself.

And I said, 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, while always in process, I'm over the hump, right? There's a degree of processing that has happened, but for me.

The picking is something that I am not over the hump on. I'm on the near side of the hill, 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. I need to call up a friend and see who has the bandwidth to listen to a two minute vent. And I think that the I think you can't go through life without wobbly dominoes. It's, you're just blessed if you can clock them, if you know what they are. And you can use them as the canary in the coal mine.

And certainly that for me is the most glaring sign of the struggle bus heating up. 

Zibby: Wow. Know your expressions are so poetic. I hope you realize that. 

Elizabeth: Oh. 

Zibby: After the fact. 

Elizabeth: I'll take it. 

Zibby: It's so I feel I'm like, how do I highlight something that is happening in speech in real time as I need to, there needs to be like a screen grab, a quote, grab of, zoom or reality or something. The way the two cam works music,..

Elizabeth: I'll take it. Yeah. 

Zibby: Realtime transcription. Yeah, something like that. 

Elizabeth: You must notate your books quite a bit. You must have strong marginalia game. You've.. 

Zibby: I don't, I dog ear do I That's I dog ear whenever something strikes me and then I go back and if I can figure out what it was then chances are, and usually I can yeah.

Elizabeth: That sounds very familiar. 

Zibby: Yeah. Love, love to dog ear. 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.

Yeah. Thank you so much. It was really a, really a pleasure. Thank you. 

Elizabeth: Thank you. I appreciate it. I think our, I think increasingly our most precious resource is time, so I appreciate yours very much. 

Zibby: Oh, thank you so much. All right. Good luck with all your lunch. 

Elizabeth: Thank you so much. Take care.

Zibby: Okay. 

Elizabeth: Have a good day. Bye bye. 

Zibby: You too. Bye-bye.