Portland, Ore. ? What parent of a teenager hasn’t heard the refrain, often accompanied by an exaggerated eye-roll, and with an emphasis on the second syllable for maximum insolence: “Whatever, Mom”?

Author Ariel Gore, now 33, heard the phrase from her 14-year-old daughter, Maia, over and over, so many times that when she sat down to write the latest in her series of alternative-parenting guides, the title was obvious.

Out came “Whatever, Mom: Hip Mama’s Guide to Raising a Teenager,” a 257-page stew of advice, musings and teenage angst for adolescents and the hipster parents who love them.

“Having an adolescent is like feeling completely isolated, almost like having an infant again,” Gore said in an interview with The Associated Press. “You wonder, ‘Is this normal, am I a weak, degenerate person, should I be alarmed, should I just make peace with the universe?'”

Gore first gained national prominence in 1995, when she took on über-Republican Newt Gingrich in an MTV-sponsored debate about welfare reform. At the time, she was a graduate student in Berkeley, Calif., a single parent of a small child, snatching a few hours of sleep a night if she was lucky, living month-to-month on an income that was anchored by the very welfare checks Gingrich was crusading against.

Now based out of Portland, Gore edits the Hip Mama zine, and draws heavily on her own experiences of raising Maia, who for a while was the perfect child for a self-proclaimed hip mama: radical like her mother, dressed in black from head to toe and the publisher of her very own zine.

Until she turned 13.

The way the two of them tell it, it happened almost overnight, Maia waking up, putting on a pink shirt, forbidding her mother to speak in front of her friends and announcing plans to try out for the cheerleading squad at her Portland middle school.

Her mother had never even been to a football game.

Gore’s other parenting guides — “The Hip Mama Survival Guide” and “The Mother Trip,” both about raising younger children — were written when Maia was safely past the ages detailed in the books. This time around, though, Gore said she figured she might as well benefit from her own research into the murk of teenage years.

“I learned that I wanted her to turn into her own person,” Gore said. “I need to get over myself.”

The book hits on most of the prominent teenage (and adult) topics: sex, drugs, crime, suicide, religion. Gore intersperses hard-nosed advice about backing up rules with consequences (but not necessarily draconian ones) and about listening between the lines to teenagers, with interviews with teenagers and their parents, and essays by Maia.