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.