When Jessica Hopper started her book tour for "The Girls' Guide to Rocking" in Portland the other night, she unwittingly experienced an aspect of the oeuvre that may not be in the book, but could one day serve her readers well.

"Right when I was done, my friends and I went to a bar and I discovered I’m violently allergic to horchata," said Hopper, a freelance writer for the Chicago Reader and Chicago Tribune, by phone from Seattle. "I don’t drink, so horchata’s the hard stuff for me. I got violently ill, barfing for two hours, and three hours later I had to be on a plane."

Ah, the rock life. The 32-year-old Hopper will discuss this and other aspects of starting and being in a band Thursday (7:30 p.m.) at Magers and Quinn in Minneapolis, when she reads from "Rocking" -- a smart, funny how-to for any mom or dad interested in giving their daughters roots and wings and rock and roll.

MinnPost: Tell me about how you came up. It was the time of riot grrl and you were doing [the fanzine] "Hit It Or Quit It," right?

Jessica Hopper: Right. I started doing "Hit It Or Quit It" when I was in ninth or tenth grade, and kept publishing that until about four years ago. We only got up to 19 issues in 15 years, but at least we published. And riot grrl and the Minneapolis music scene certainly informed the book, but this is the book I really wish I’d had when I was 16.

Parts of it are written from that experience of being 16 and totally confounded: "How do I get a show? How does this work? How do I keep a band together? How do I even write a song?" You know, all I knew was that I bought this $90  guitar and a $15 amp and, "How do I get from that to ... [Husker Du’s] 'Zen Arcade'?" I mean, I really had no idea, but I was so excited to play and so excited to have bands with my friends.

MP: What would the 32-year-old you say to the 16-year-old you, in terms of how to start a band?

JH: Aside from, "Just do it. Start your band," my main advice is, "There’s no one right way to do things. Lots of times that held me up when I was younger. I was taking guitar lessons from a guy who said, 'Well, first you have to learn 'Smoke On the Water.' ' I was hanging out with guys who said you have to be really good at something before you can play guitar or bass or whatever in a band. And it was really discouraging. Thank god punk rock and riot grrl liberated me from the dudes in my health class telling me, 'Your hands aren’t big enough [to play guitar].' "

MP: Why is it important to distinguish between boys and girls at that age?

JH: I think it’s still much more encouraged, and maybe a natural thing for a boy to pick up a guitar and then come home from school and spend five, six hours in his room noodling along with his favorite records. I think some people still do view rock as the boy's world, and I want to do whatever I can to help encourage girls to do it for themselves. Sometimes girls are socialized differently; they’re encouraged to do different after-school activities than boys.

MP: It’s very much like Title IX. There can’t be enough things out there that say to girls, "Hey. Do Your Thing."

JH: There’s two dozen girls' rock camps in North America, alone. But there are girls in rural Florida who don’t have rock camps, and I hope that maybe by some off chance some girl’s mom there saw my book on "Good Morning, America" or got it off Amazon.

I mean, I grew up in the city. I grew up seeing Sunday matinees at the [7th St.] Entry, but not all girls have those opportunities. So I agree: I'll do anything I can do to take the girl from idolizing Taylor Swift to making the leap to thinking, 'I want to be Taylor Swift.'

MP: I know that you and Terri Sutton were tight back in the day. Who were your older women musical mentors?

JH: I had been going to shows for about a year, but it never occurred to me that I could be in a band, too, until I saw Babes in Toyland. Of course. Lori Barbero was the first woman in a band I was friends with, and I just thought that it was the coolest that I might see her at the bus stop every now and again and she would know my name. For ninth-grade me, that was big [stuff].

I feel like I came up at a great time in Minneapolis rock history: We had Babes, and Zuzu’s Petals, the Pseudonymphs, Smut, and the The Blue Up? There were so many cool local women making music that were accessible to me. All those bands played all-ages shows, and they weren’t untouchable rock gods. I was lucky that I worshipped people who were closer to the ground, rather than people I saw on television. And of course Terri Sutton. To this day she’s what I aspire to as a rock writer.

MP: Do you remember the rock doc "Not Bad For a Girl"? I was checking it out the other night, and I couldn’t help but think the title is archaic.

JH: I vaguely remember it; it seems like it was the first women-in-rock documentary. It is totally archaic. I feel like the big difference between when I came up and now is that being a girl in a band is a totally accessible idea. Just in the last decade or 15 years that’s changed.

The year I graduated from high school, Hole, Liz Phair, and the Breeders all had gold records and they were on MTV and stuff; I came up in a real golden age of women in rock. Now, not only do we have rock camps, but we have Disney movies about girls going to rock camp, or girls being in bands. We have all different types of archetypes for women in rock. We have Joan Jett and Chrissie Hynde. We have Taylor Swift and these Disney girls, but we also have St. Vincent and Lily Allen, you know? There’s so many different types of totally self-made women that girls can look up to.

Taylor Swift sold out the Staples Center [in Los Angeles] three weeks ago. She’s 17. She writes most of her own stuff. She broke Billboard history by being the only artist to have two albums finish in the top 10 for a year, and she might be two grades older than the girls reading my book.

Jessica Hopper, reading from "The Girls' Guide to Rocking," 7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 16. at Magers & Quinn, Minneapolis.