Families are created through conception, adoption, fostering and family-blending. As a Philadelphia Inquirer columnist for nearly a decade, Anndee Hochman interviewed hundreds of parents–older and younger, single and coupled, straight and queer–about the paths they forged and the obstacles they faced on the road to form a family. Parent Trip is Hochman’s collection of these poignant, wry, and complicated stories.

Hochman recounts the fraught emotions of couples struggling with infertility, the joy of a single gay man becoming a father in his forties, and the anxiety of people waiting for the adoption worker to call with good news. Parent Trip tells of sperm donors and gestational surrogates, midwives and miscarriages; it chronicles how children prompt parents to recalibrate their lives.

In personal essays that weave throughout the profiles, Hochman connects her interviewees’ lives to the love, heartbreak, and uncertainty in her own path to parenthood. Through myriad mundane and extraordinary moments, Parent Trip not only chronicles the magic and labor of childrearing, it also celebrates the infinite ways real families come to be.

Anndee Hochman is a freelance writer, educator and storyteller. She is the author of Anatomies: A Novella and Stories and Everyday Acts & Small Subversions: Women Reinventing Family, Community and Home. For nine years, she wrote the weekly “Parent Trip” column in the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her articles, essays and commentaries have appeared in WebMD, Poets & Writers, O, the Oprah Magazine, Redbook, Philadelphia magazine, Broad Street Review and other publications. She is a twelve-time Moth Story Slam winner and tied for the first-place title in Philadelphia’s 2022 GrandSlam.