So, who are you?

“So, who are you?”

This was the first question from the big-name L.A. agent sitting across the table as I pitched my book idea. It was August of 2009.

It wasn’t so much the question as how she asked it. Like, “So, who the hell are you? I’m busy. And important.”

“Excuse me?” I replied.

“Who are you? What have you done? What have you written?”

I can’t say her social graces impressed me. I mean, I got it. She’s trying to cut to the chase and qualify me. “But really,” I thought to myself, “this is her warm up line?”

“I’m not anybody. I’m not an author or celebrity or big name anybody. I’m Dad. Like a billion or two other dads around the world, I get up in the morning, go to work, come home spent and do the best I can at something I know nothing about—raising daughters.

“Like fathers all over, I got trained and licensed to drive. I got older, and trained to be a manager. But I never got trained how to raise a daughter, and I don’t know the first thing about what it means to be a daughter in relationship to her dad.

“So I’m writing a book for dads, and also for the two billion adult daughters around the world who had fathers who loved them, ignored them, or even betrayed their trust and violated them. And that’s what makes this an important book.”

That was my fantasy response anyway. But when you’re writing your first book, you’re in the sucking up business. You suck up to agents. They suck up to acquisition editors. And those editors and their employers, the publishers, suck up to the media for book hype, and to retailers. And they suck up to the public—you and me. So here I was in the first cycle of this big sucking machine that I wanted to wash, rinse and spin my book.

So instead of blurting out my fantasy, I turned off the adolescent rampage running through my mind, and told this agent the truth: I’m a dad, who wanted to do a better job of raising his adolescent daughters before our time together ran out. But I didn’t really know what that “better job” looked like. What exactly, I wondered, do great dad actually do? So I went out and talked to experts—daughters—from around the world.

The women were young and old; rich and poor; well-known and anonymous; lesbian, straight, and transgender. I spoke with professional athletes and former drug addicts. I met women with lives of abundance and others who had been homeless, suicidal, or with so few options that they sold their bodies to men for a living.

We talked for hours. Their intensely personal and emotional stories came up and out like volcanoes exploding and blowing out lava that every time found its own path down its own mountain.

“I’ll tell you what will sell this book,” the big name agent continued. “You go get interviews with Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears. Now that will sell.”

So ended my pitch.

I couldn’t have cared less about Lindsay or Britney or Paris. At 52, I had just lost my job. I spent the next 18 months starting my own business, writing this book, and learning how to be a better dad. In many ways, it was the hardest year-and-a-half of my life, and in some ways the best.

I set out on my journey of awakening and had no idea how profoundly it would change me. I wanted to understand how fathers shape their daughters. In the process, the 50 daughters I met recreated me as a father. This book—and the lessons for fathers and daughters everywhere—is built upon their stories. And mine.