No matter how the remake of “The Dinner Game” turns out (Dreamworks has it in development, and Veber may direct), the original, now in theaters, should win back the goodwill of comedy-watchers everywhere. It’s a sour, sweet, then sour again spree. The two leads are a smug, good-looking publisher and an accountant as squat and badly-used as a neighborhood dog’s favorite hydrant.

The publisher invites the accountant to a group dinner that’s actually a game — the fellow who brings the sorriest bore wins. The accountant qualifies because he’s obsessed with making matchstick recreations of engineering feats like the Eiffel Tower or the Concorde. But the pair never get to the dinner game. And in a satisfying case of existential turnaround, the accountant — with the best intentions, and without leaving the publisher’s home — ruins his host’s life.

At the end of a publicity jaunt from Los Angeles to San Francisco (he has homes in West Hollywood and Paris), Veber couldn’t have been more gracious. Making sure that I had not just a Perrier from his hotel room mini-bar but also a proper water glass, he confessed that he identified with both of his characters — well, maybe a little more with the accountant.

Does doing one of these tours make you feel the host or the idiot?

I feel like the two of them all the time.

So you sometimes think that the press is setting you up to be a jerk?

There is this question that keeps coming back, all the time, about Jerry Lewis. It’s like a guilt that we French are supposed to have forever. I mean, Jerry Lewis hasn’t been part of our landscape for 20 years. But that question keeps coming: “Do you like Jerry Lewis?”

I only went to Cannes once, 14 years ago, and at an official dinner I was seated next to the wife of a French publisher. I asked her if she liked Jerry Lewis. And she answered, “You know, the first time I see his movies, I don’t think they’re very funny. But the second time I see his movies, I laugh and laugh!”

That’s like the guy who goes to get a tattoo. The first time you think he’s an idiot, the second time you think he’s a very suspicious character.

So now I have to ask you: Do you like Jerry Lewis?

Actually, he’s done some good material. The films he did with Frank Tashlin, or the one they remade — I don’t know how they say it in English, the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thing, “The Magic Professor?”

“The Nutty Professor.” And “The Ladies’ Man” is not bad either. But tell me — I’m a bit like the medical man in “The Dinner Game.” I’ve heard about fraternity boys competing to bring the ugliest girl to a party, but I’ve never heard of grown-ups competing to bring the stupidest man. Is that your invention?

No, it’s a real game. They still play it in Paris. A mean, a cruel game, and I didn’t like it. So I decided to punish one of the guys who did. There’s an exclusive, private club in Paris — the members are people from advertising or the record business, the “media” — and those guys were playing this game, bringing the biggest jerk they could find. I heard stories about it. I had friends who say they participated — for example, an anchorman in Paris. He had to bring a jerk to one of these dinners, and his jerk was supposed to be a world-class one — and was sick the day of the dinner. Now my friend needed a new jerk. So he called this TV director who was supposed to be amazingly stupid. But this TV director had already been invited! My friend was the second guy calling him! So you see, this is a real game. And a mean game.

Have you ever been invited?

Maybe I have been! Because you know, when I start to talk about screenwriting, I can be as obnoxious as the guy [in "The Dinner Game"] talking about his matchstick things. They punish you for being passionate about something.

I meant, were you invited to be a “host!” Are you saying you based the lead character on someone you know?

A lot of guys I know, guys who had everything when they were born. Handsome, tall, blond, blue-eyed, from rich families. The other guy looks like E.T. or the Hunchback of Paris next to these beautiful people. Two extremes facing each other — I like the chemistry of that.

We never feel too sorry for “the idiot” because in his own world he’s just as snobbish — he mocks Belgians, for example. And he works for the Financial Ministry and brings a killer tax collector into the other man’s house.

You are perfectly right. It’s the ambiguity of the character, because he’s not exactly an idiot. He’s more dangerous than an idiot — dangerous on two levels, because when a jerk wants to help, he’s the most dangerous man in the world. And he’s dangerous as a deus ex machina — he knows when a guy can be audited. You see on his face, at one moment in the film, “I am holding you by the balls now.” So he’s more dangerous than he seems to be. Tax people are not the most popular people here in the U.S., but in France, they are hated.

You made a movie called “The Dinner Game.” But you never really show us the dinner game.

If you try to show a real jerk talking, it’s dangerous — there’s a potential that the audience can feel what he’s saying is true. So I just had a few seconds of a guy at the dinner saying how he’d kill a wallaby or an ostrich with his boomerang. That was enough.

When I was at school, we were taught Henri Bergson’s theory of comedy — that it derives from disrupted habits, patterns that are broken.

I didn’t think of Bergson when I made this movie, but I love his theory. I still remember a story told in his book about a preacher in church, giving his sermon. He’s so touching, and so emotional, that everyone is crying except one guy. And a man turns to him and says, “You’re not touched by what this priest is saying?” And the guy says, “I don’t belong to this church.”

Does a comedy such as this one, that plays on social stereotypes — like, say, the beautiful person with the charmed life and the haute bourgeois background — play more naturally in France?

It does play more naturally in France. But there is a kind of contempt for poor people in Los Angeles, and it’s almost the same thing as the class difference in France. I have a house in the hills in West Hollywood — very quiet, I can take my bike and ride in the hills, then go back and write. What I’ve found is that for a lot of people here, a man who is richer is more intelligent than a man who is less rich. Which is very stupid, because you can be very rich and very stupid. But Rupert Murdoch is supposed to be more intelligent than one of his lieutenants — because he’s richer. So this is a clichi, too, and it exists in America.

I’ve seen the film at festivals here, with crowds made up of almost all Americans, and they were laughing as much as the audience in France. Maybe they understand this kind of humor, even if it’s not about the same social structure you have here. Maybe here class has been replaced by wealth.

Why has it been harder for you to have success with the remakes of your movies in America?

Let’s say I’m a producer, and I have my writer, and we buy a film to remake it. And we watch this film 10 times, 15 times. And the jokes start to fade, they are less fresh. And my new writer comes up with a new joke and I say, Oh, good, this one is fun. He’s bringing his world into the world of the original writer and sometimes it doesn’t fit. So you have something that is supposed to be richer than the original — but it’s like putting Chantilly crhme on goose liver. It’s rich but bad.

I met an intelligent writer called Elaine May in New York; she and Mike Nichols remade “La Cage aux Folles” as “The Birdcage.” And she told me that she tried to stay as close as possible to the French movie so two worlds were not fighting.

I didn’t think anything in “The Birdcage” was up to Michel Serrault’s performance in “La Cage aux Folles,” but at least the filmmakers didn’t fool with the structure. And the structure was so strong it clicked for the audience.

“La Cage aux Folles” was one of the best concepts I ever worked on because those people trying to be straight for one evening are just nice, their act comes from the heart. They want to help their son. That’s the reason these two poor clowns are so touching.

In general, these days, the American versions of European comedies are much, much broader.

But you have some wonderful comedies here. I saw recently “Analyze This,” with De Niro and Billy Crystal, and I would have liked to have this premise, I liked it very much, this psychiatrist and this mobster.

The problem often in America is that the producer or the director or the writer underestimate the audience. They think things have to be broad, have to be hammered, have to be heavy — and the audience is far faster than they think.

The problem here, too, is the credits, because the studios change teams of writers like Kleenex — pick two writers, then pick two others, then two others. Because all those writers fight to be the ones who have the credits, you are almost always at the point of the first draft, even at the end.

And there are characters that the executives at the studios won’t let you do here. Like the one the executives call a wimp. When a guy is a weak guy, an anti-hero, if he cries, like a Mastroianni type — “He’s a wimp.” If he doesn’t have an arc that makes him become Rambo, they don’t want to touch this guy. I love a man who is courageous enough to say he’s weak, but they say “Oh, my God.”

“The Dinner Game” is 80 minutes long. I love that.

I didn’t want to make the movie longer. You know I could have put in a subplot. It’s easy to imagine: We follow the wife as she drives through Paris, and it opens up the movie. And I say, no! I want to focus on the two guys. And I say to myself, what is the American movie I prefer for the last two or three years? And it was “Men in Black.” It’s one hour and 23 minutes long. Those guys in “Men in Black,” when they go in the special service, they have no past and no future anymore. So you avoid those horrible scenes where the guy goes back home and the wife asks him, “Why are you doing this dangerous job?” and the kids are crying. You avoid all that trash, and you get this film that goes whooof! So I didn’t put subplots in “The Dinner Game.” Eighty minutes is enough.

Even when the wife and another driver collide, you don’t make too big a deal of it.

After I showed the movie in Washington, a man raised his hand, and said, “I liked your movie very much, but I have a question for you: What happened to the other driver?” I thought he was kidding, so I said, “The other driver’s wife and seven children had to go on welfare because he died in the crash.”

Then he said, “No, no, I’m serious, what happened to the other driver?”

And I asked, “What are you doing for dinner tonight, sir?”

I’m kinda fond of Hooters. As chain restaurants go, it is a fine establishment with a specific culinary point of view. Food-wise it never tries to be anything it isn’t. The food is deeply fried and tastes like shame, but the bathrooms are always very clean. The domestic beer is served in a frosty cold mug.

The service is spectacular, and I’m not making a dumb joke about boobs here. I’ve had waitresses scare me up cigarettes after casually mentioning that I’d love a smoke, I’ve had waitresses offer to watch my computer while I go have a cigarette or make a run to one of the pristine bathrooms, I’ve even gotten the rare corporate beer buy-back. But mostly, the service is attentive and friendly without being overbearing and obnoxious, which is sort of an amazing feat considering the dress code.

And speaking of the dress code, while those tank tops can be kind of awe-inspiring, the Hooters ensemble, as a whole, is a turn-off. It looks like it was developed by a colorblind exercise fetishist in 1983. It’s a hard look for most earth women to pull off successfully.

Hooters is an asexual place for me. I don’t go there to get my blood pumping; I go there to feel my blood clogging as I watch the Phillies and get some work done. I don’t go to Hooters for a pseudo-sexual performance in the same way I don’t go to the strip club for the buffet (that’s for hardcore perverts).

So I didn’t think it would be weird to take the kid to Hooters.

I had never taken either of my kids to Hooters before, especially not at night when random bikini or lingerie contests occasionally break out, because I’m not sure my daughter needs to be exposed to that kind of awkward chaos just yet. But in the daylight hours, Hooters not only has fried pickles, but it also has high chairs, and a kids’ menu, although I might argue that it’s all a kids’ menu. (And now might argue that the kids’ menu is an affront.)

After all, I’ve taken my daughter to much seedier establishments around Philadelphia in pursuit of sandwiches. Why not try a clean corporate world with a weird dress code? Outside a sandwich shop in South Philly a man with an unintentionally exposed handgun in his waistband once tickled my daughter’s chin to make her laugh and told me what a lucky guy I was. Nice fella.

My daughter has also seen women (occasionally working) in much skimpier outfits, and the fabric of our family has not been torn asunder as a result. In fact, when I met my daughter’s mother, she was working behind a bar in a place that served wings and she was wearing a top that was nearly, if not equally, form fitting as those found at Hooters. I thought it might even be a good lesson for my daughter to see that we don’t judge or treat people differently because of the way they’re dressed, and that people are not the sum total of their apparel; for instance, I am not a hobo, even though I dress like one.

I expected to walk into Hooters at 11 a.m. and have a bunch of bored waitresses fawning all over my daughter. We’d get attention and good laughs, maybe even a comped order of mozzarella sticks, and my daughter would see how casually and normally Daddy interacts with women in tight tank tops.

Instead we walked in at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday and found a smattering of guys sitting by themselves or in pairs at the bar already drinking hard and vying for attention from waitresses who looked seriously thrown off their rhythm by the arrival of a 2-year-old.

It was in that moment that I realized that beyond all the debate about exhibitionism and objectification, Hooters is a bar, and forcing your kid on a group of adults who want to get drunk is a dick move, especially guys who want to get drunk at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday … at a Hooters. That type of guy is looking for something a little more extreme to go with his problems than what the corner bar has to offer.

But more important, my daughter’s presence obviously affected the way the waitresses could deal with those guys. The kid’s presence was disrupting the ever-shifting balance of power between client and patron in a sexually charged alcohol-fueled situation. I had upended the delicate Hooters ecosphere.

The guys who had just been joking with the bartenders looked at me like they would like to strangle me with a pair of flesh-toned leggings. The waitresses were cold; instead of the usual big, “Welcome to Hooters!” I got a clipped, “Can I help you with something?” Instead of being shown to our table we were hemmed in by a stony-faced phalanx of orange-and-white-clad servers who silently established a perimeter around us preventing entrance into the main dining room or access to a table by the bar, a well-endowed Praetorian Guard, protecting the sanctity of their establishment from the sticky-fingered cuteness of my 2-year-old. They were all cold eyes, and concerned looks, whereas normally it’s all about smiles and calisthenics. They looked at me like I was stupid for bringing my daughter to Hooters. Me! Stupid?! I had never had icy service at Hooters, but as the greeter had a muffled conversation with one of the other perimeter guards and pointed at me and my daughter I made the command decision to get our fried pickles to go.

The next 10 minutes were some of the longest of my life. As we waited for our order, the only sound was the replay telecast of Duke vs. the University of Eastern Irkutsk — or whatever the hell ballgame is playing on Tuesday at 11 a.m. on ESPN2. My daughter was understandably mesmerized by the bright orange shorts and the ladies with hair extensions. She made entreaties to be noticed by some of the waitresses and she was rebuffed with extreme prejudice. Then she headed over to start gabbing at some of the guys at the bar, who did not seem to offer the smiles she is so used to receiving. I picked her up and held her until our pickles finally arrived. As the door closed behind us, I could hear the 11 a.m. Hooters fiesta begin again.

Perhaps it would have been different if we were there for the lunch rush when the place was packed, but I’m not willing to take the chance again. Hooters touches the holy trinity of guydom with booze, sports and women’s sexuality. And it’s not fair to anyone to slap a kid in the middle of it. Not to the people who work there and have to worry about the kid’s safety and boundaries, and not to the kid, who wonders why everyone is acting so weird.

In five years of fatherhood, here is the one tangible lesson I can pass along: Don’t take your daughter to Hooters. Or the racetrack. Or the bar. (Brooklyn, I’m talking to you.) As cool and comfortable as I want my kids to be in a wide variety of situations, there are some joints that are a little too spicy for the young’uns (if you know what I mean). Like me, you may want to be a cool and casual relaxed parent with cool, casual and relaxed kids, but how relaxed are your kids going to be when their earliest memories are strangers recoiling from them in shame and fear and annoyance? Part of what I want for my kids will come from trying to avoid weird and uncomfortable situations before they’re ready. That means being a little more thoughtful about their feelings and other people’s feelings. That means being thoughtful and considerate — two things that were not a big part of my emotional vocabulary before I had children. It doesn’t come naturally, but it’s coming.

Spending time with your kids is one of the most important parts of being a parent. Figuring out how to act like a grown-up and still have fun during that time may be equally important. Here’s what I learned: Get the fried pickles to go.

As a boy, my vision of my father was hindered by physical fear. All I saw was a giant, one who would periodically strike me to unleash his rage.

Just as I became a man, my father, William Manchester, rocketed to international fame after the publication of his bestseller “The Death of a President.” Now he towered over me in the world. All I saw was how much he had achieved and how little I had in comparison.

Just as my father reached the age I am now, 60, the mask of the famous author slipped and I saw a very different face, that of his shadow.

As the skeletons clattered from our family closet — my father’s secret lifetime of self-destructive habits, his marriage that was something out of a horror movie — I could only blink in disbelief. How could these two men, these two lives, coexist in a single body?

Was he a writer of tireless discipline, who could work around the clock, who published 18 books, some over a thousand pages long? Or the man powerless in the face of his addictions?

Was he the man who’d met four presidents, who’d fought Bobby and Jackie Kennedy and won? Or the husband who sat alone in his own home because his wife wouldn’t let his friends inside, not even his brother?

Was he the Marine who received a Navy Cross for grabbing a machine gun and running up a hill into an enemy position? Or was he the person who cowered before his dentist, who was afraid to fire secretaries, who could barely stand to enter a roomful of strangers?

Eight years before my father died, his heart was within days of giving out on him. I drove him to the hospital for a quadruple bypass, acutely aware that these might be our last moments together. I asked him how he felt — to offer comfort, to touch his heart just once while I still could. He said, “I’m not afraid. I stared death in the face on Okinawa and said, ‘Fuck you!’” We rode the rest of the way in silence.

It’s the tough Marine whose picture stares, pipe clenched in his teeth, from the cover of his 1980 memoir of combat, “Goodbye Darkness.” After he died I found a series of outtakes from that photo shoot. He mugs for the camera, putting on mask after mask. What stuck with me was the one of him grinning, saturnine, all powerful. But not one of them was really him.

When the mother of my childhood best friend died, a woman who was dear to my entire family, my father delivered the eulogy. He was overcome by tears and could barely finish speaking. I had never seen my father cry. Maybe this was the real person coming out at last. But in the car after the funeral he said, “I disgraced myself.”

He was a frail boy, terrible at sports. His father beat him, demanding, “Don’t cry.” The jeers of his peers and blows of his father rained down on a person of extraordinary sensitivity. That sensitivity would later prove a valuable asset for him as a writer. But as a youth he could only cover it in thick armor. That armor served him well in literal combat. It also closed him off from feelings of fear and loneliness.

What he felt instead were the extraordinary highs and lows of his fluctuating self-esteem. He’d always suffered mood swings, but fame and chemicals escalated their intensity. He was forever on top of the world or at the bottom of the deepest pit, never in between.

I spoke with one of his few surviving Marine buddies, who offered this simple wisdom, “Your father was just a man. A good man, but just a man.”

And there’s the real person that neither of us could ever see: just a man.

“The early bird gets the worm!” we would shout in unison.

It was the early 1980s and the oil boom was in full-swing. Our sales strategy consisted of driving the back roads of Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas and Iowa looking for prospects. We kept our eyes peeled for the lone gas station attendant or a do-it-yourself mechanic working on his car. But what interested us most were the oil rig sites where, at any given time, a group of two or three migrant workers could be found taking a smoke break or digging into the sandwiches they’d brought from home.

“These guys have so much money in their pockets they are just waiting for an opportunity to spend it,” Dad would say as we pulled up to a job site. “Well, they are about to get their chance.”

Whenever Dad or I spotted what looked like a good prospect, Dad parked the truck, hopped out and initiated a conversation.

“Is it hot enough for you, today?” he would ask, or “I think it’s quitting time, don’t you?”

If the guy responded positively, Dad would make small talk for a couple more minutes to warm him up. Then he would casually mention that he was liquidating some tools and ask if the guy would like to take a look.

I always waited for the designated moment to bring out the merchandise. Sometimes Dad just looked over at the truck and gave me a quick nod. On other occasions, it boiled down to time.

“If I’m still gone after five minutes, bring me a wrench set,” he would say as he left the truck.

When it was time, I grabbed the agreed upon tools from the back of the truck, ran to Dad’s side and flashed my warmest smile. When our prospect saw that Dad had a daughter with him, it usually softened him up and he was willing to spend $15 even if he didn’t need a wrench set. Unlike my siblings, who viewed our father as a stranger who rarely visited, I understood Dad and his need to be free. But it was during those long hours on the road that I really began to see what drove him.

Dad filled me with stories about his childhood. He told me about growing up on a farm in a four-room shack without heat, running water or even an indoor toilet. Each morning at 4 a.m., Dad helped Grandpa feed the pigs and milk the cows. Then he headed off to elementary school while Grandpa traveled sixty miles to a construction job — which barely netted enough to cover the basics for a growing family that would swell to 11 children.

“I would read these books on slavery and about how slaves were given a rundown shack and a little food in exchange for their labor,” Dad told me as we drove down the road. “Then I would look at my dad and realize he was a slave. He worked so hard every day and all he got in exchange was barely enough to put a shack over our heads and feed us. I decided that I was going to do whatever it took to escape that life. “

To others, Dad and I might have looked like slaves ourselves. Each day we were forced to earn enough money to survive until the next and rarely took time off. When we had a good sales day, we rented a room at a Motel 6. When we didn’t, we crashed in a rest area or a truck stop parking lot.

We spent 12 hours a day in a hot truck without air conditioning. But to Dad and me, it was paradise. Each morning we headed out on an open highway, the truck taking us wherever we wanted to go as we belted out the lyrics to Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” our theme song. And unlike the never-ending home church sessions and suffocating, rigid lifestyle I faced at home, Dad and I had only one rule: sell tools.

With the pressure always on us to make money, we rarely had time for entertainment. But we occasionally took a break and treated ourselves to a movie or a steak and baked potato at Shoney’s. We also had a standing weekly date with the TV show “Dallas.” Dad loved the main character, J.R., both because he was a savvy, ruthless businessman who had millions of dollars, and because Dad’s name, Jerry Ricks, shared the same initials.

“You know what time it is, don’t you?” Dad would say each Sunday night, a few minutes before the show was to begin.

“It’s Dallas time!” I would call out.

If we were at a motel, we kicked back on our beds with a can of Diet Dr. Pepper a piece and flipped on the TV. If we were spending the night in the truck, we found a truck stop lounge, plopped down on one of the couches, and lost ourselves in the lives of J.R., Sue Ellen and the rest of the Dallas gang.

Our time on the road together ended when I started my junior year in high school. Dad and I had a run-in with the law that had shaken both of us and made me rethink our lifestyle. But more than that, I was now sixteen and wanted to date and hang out with friends. Dad was also ready to move on. He had met a woman we both knew would take my place on the road.

Our lives drifted apart. He got married and eventually so did I. We both started new families and settled in different parts of the country.

Dad’s now almost 72 and at 44, I’m the age he was the last summer we traveled together — with a 12-year-old daughter of my own who’s a lot like I was back then.

I called him the other day to tell him I would be in his city the last week in June. We’d had a rare, explosive argument a few weeks earlier and I knew we were both hurting. We needed to recapture the magic of our time together — back when it was just the two of us, a truck full of tools, an open road and Willie Nelson singing on the radio.

“How about if we have a dad/daughter date, just you and me,” I said into the phone, feeling myself yearning for the past. “I’ll take you out for a nice dinner and maybe we can even rent a motel room, just like old times.”

“Yes. Absolutely,” he said, the heavy weight lifting from voice. “We need that, you and me. We really do.”

He paused for a moment and I knew what was coming.

“Maybe I should load up an old truck with tools and you and me hit the road for a week or two. What do you think about that?”

I smiled at the up-tick in his voice.

“Yeah those days were really something, weren’t they, Ingrid?” he continued, his voice trailing off. “Whatever happens in life, no one can ever take that away from us.”

I noticed a curious thing about gamblers from an early age: Daddy didn’t get excited when he won at the track. No, the adrenaline would be flowing, the monologue would be deafening and he’d come roaring into the house, pacing up and down and yelling — when he’d almost won. And he’d be cursing when he lost.

So when he was quiet, I figured he’d won some money. He wasn’t often quiet.

The closest conversations I can remember with Daddy were at dinnertime, when he’d offer a nickel to my sister, my brother or me — whichever of us gave the best report of our school day. We competed for the 5 cents until we realized it wasn’t worth it unless he upped the payoff to a dime.

We lived in rented apartments and bungalows until one year when Daddy must have bet big on long shots in the daily double and we moved to a half-block-long, marble-floored art moderne mansion with a buzzer in the floor of the dining room to call “the Help.” The following year we were poor again, and Daddy would go into my wallet to borrow my allowance. He always said he’d pay me back, but he never did.

Our parents weren’t officially separated — almost no couples were in those days — and yet half the year they lived apart. From April to September, he holed up in a seedy Boston hotel called the Touraine where the elevator was manned by a one-legged operator. It was near the dog track at Revere.

But we didn’t see all that much of Daddy even while he was home in Miami Beach, and my brother and sister and I thought his leaving was as natural as the hurricanes that arrived in his absence.

Mom seemed happier when he left, which confused the hell out of my childhood self, who believed in sitcom family units where daddies wore suits to dinner and moms served apple pie in gingham aprons, not families where Daddy went off to work at the race track and stayed away for six months, and called to wish his daughter a happy birthday, on the wrong day, and asked, “How old are you now, Lea?” At least he got my name straight.

It did come in handy on occasion, though. After my grandfather taught me to read at 2 years old, my dad was not only proud, he figured out a way to capitalize on his “smartypants daughter.” He would use me as a shill.

So we would walk around where the tourists would hang out in South Beach. If he found someone reading the Racing Form, Daddy would say, “I’ll take out my Racing Form and you can point to something and my baby daughter will read it.”

Then the gamblers would figure he had prepped me to learn from the paper he held. They must have thought that I could memorize, but I was too young to read, and they were on to something and could make some money.

“OK,” some would say, “I’ll bet you she won’t read — and I get to choose from my form.” But I usually could read whatever they put in front of me. Often it was the name of horses, and Daddy would prep me as a game: “Murray’s Desire.” “Long Boat Key.” “Blue Dame.”

“She’s a midget,” they’d grumble, forking over a Benjamin.

Mom divorced Daddy when I was in my 20s, and for a while he lived in a small apartment by the dog track. She remarried him a year later.

Not long before his death at the age of 83, we were watching a “60 Minutes” segment together about gambling addiction. Daddy was long “retired,” but still visited the track during the day, and often gambled away his Social Security check.

After the TV segment, my dad turned to me. This was his chance to show me, finally, that he had learned something about his lifetime of ruined potential and broken relationships. A chance to say he was sorry to the daughter whom he had involved in his gambling since she was a toddler, the neglected daughter whose age he still did not know, and who very well could have been named for Hialeah Race Track.

Daddy looked at me with resignation and shame. It took him a long time to get the words out.

“That wasn’t easy to watch,” he said.

I was ready for his late epiphany, and a chance for some closure for both of us.

“It’s really too bad,” he said, staring at me with the sad look of an old man. “I mean, I know addicted gamblers like that.”

How could I possibly have understood my father when he never could understand himself?

Somewhere along the line I think I forgot that raising kids was a marathon and not a dash. I foolishly believed that conscientious parenting covered zero to five years, and with that good base, the kids were set for life. They’re in school now, my job is done, I tried to make myself believe.

The reality is that, as I write this, Ava will soon graduate from middle school, and I don’t know if I’ve ever felt less prepared.

I should’ve known I was heading for trouble when Ava was 8. The wife of one of my best friends asked me how, when the time came, I would explain to Ava puberty and menstruation. Back then I thought I’d just consult what I always consult when I want to know more about something, but then I realized that doing a Web search on “training bra” and “menstruation” was not only ineffective but seemed like a great way to get Chris Hanson from “To Catch a Predator” breaking down my door.

So my friend’s wife urged me, when the time was right, to buy the American Girl book, “The Care and Keeping of You.” Being addicted to the near-instant gratification of Amazon’s one-click , and even though my daughter was only in the second grade, I immediately ordered it. Two days later I unzipped the cardboard envelope and pried off the shrink wrap — and the book fell open to a two-page spread of a cartoon vagina.

I instantly closed the book and haven’t touched it since. It wasn’t a total waste, however. Just last month I discovered that Ava had rediscovered it, but of course when I gingerly tried to quiz her on its contents, she offered only her name, rank and serial number. I was hurt. I realize that most daughters can’t talk about such things with most dads, but c’mon, me? The guy who makes her lunches for field trips? The guy who volunteers to run the Hot Wheels racing booth at the school fair? The guy who sits down for an hour every Sunday and conditions and detangles her magnificent hair?

Ava’s hair. A young black woman’s hair. Volumes have been written on those voluminous manes. I pride myself on my prowess wrestling with my little girl’s locks, yet for her middle-school graduation she wants braids. “You can do it, Daddy,” she told me. Flattered as I was, I’m afraid she’ll end up looking like she’d been electrocuted. I’m working on getting her mom up here from her home in Atlanta, not just to be there to watch her daughter march, but the day before to do her hair.

But there is another, more personal part of Ava growing up that has recently made me nervous. Two years ago, I wrote a book of creative nonfiction laying bare the most painful events of my nuclear family’s young life. I began the book, “Bedtime Stories,” when Ava was in the second grade, so there was no chance of her reading it. Now that she’s heading into the sixth, I’m petrified that I’ll come home and see her nose in the (sometimes steamy) pages.

Novelist Meg Wolitzer, daughter of novelist Hilma Wolitzer, wrote about this writer-parent dilemma in Salon five years ago. When a boy in her high school discovered that Meg’s mother had written a scene about a blowjob in her latest book, it instantly became the scandal of the school. My memoir is not only dirtier but also involves tough family secrets. While I tried my best not to make Ava’s mother my story’s villain, the question hangs there, nevertheless, between every line and piece of punctuation: Why did a woman walk out on raising her babies?

Amanda, my amazing girlfriend, is convinced that Ava will sometime soon open the book. I’m not so sure. Ava’s heart is as finely tuned as a Stradivarius. I think she intuits that at just 10 now, she’s still way too young to understand her father’s complicated, R-rated life. Kids are amazingly adept at self-preservation. Just because they can hear their parents going at it if they press their ear up against the bedroom wall doesn’t mean they necessarily want to.

Still, if I were writing the same book now, I know I’d greatly abridge the story of my recovery from divorce and learning to raise two little ones alone.

Maybe what I’m writing here is an explanation, an addendum, to what I wrote in the book — this time tailor-made for the most amazing little girl on the planet. Few things are more important to me than loving her through the difficult tween and teen years. As I wrote in the book, “Almost every woman whom I have ever dated has also had a troubled, contentious, aggressive relationship with their own fathers. Perhaps for me it’s a prerequisite. In my lowest points, when everything around me seems to be disintegrating, I terrify myself with the thought that my own little girl will one day stop loving me. After all there was a time when her mother looked at me the way Ava looks at me now.”

But I didn’t realize how much stronger my bond was with Ava than, I think, most dads have with their daughters, until I met Amanda. Amanda sometimes calls Ava my other girlfriend. Ava isn’t classically jealous. Around Amanda she’s been less jealous than her brother in general, but I do get the sense not only that am I her “best friend,” as she tells me daily while she squeezes her whole body against my arm, but that I’m also “her man.” It’s unbelievably cute to watch her just now as she begins to separate. She became addicted, instantly, to the “Twilight” books and it was so lovely to see in her the precise moment that she felt romantic love for another man. She is “Twilight’s” Bella Swan, and Edward the vampire is taking her away from me. She actually told me, “Don’t worry, Daddy.”

It’s hard to know what she will make of love, of mating. With my loving, long-term relationship with Amanda (we plan on marrying), I hope to model for Ava a counter-argument to the failed relationship that hatched her.

The more that I think about it, perhaps reading the book, when she’s ready, will answer some questions for her. Or at the very least it should be the start of something else: a pretty interesting conversation with a newly minted adult.

Trey Ellis is a novelist, screenwriter and assistant professor at Columbia University.