It was first published in 1987 and was made into a 1998 motion picture of the same name starring Jennifer Aniston and Paul Rudd.
George Mullen is a 20-something openly gay man enrolled in the English literature graduate school program at Columbia University.
George drops out of Columbia, and takes a job teaching kindergarten alongside Melissa, a trust-fund baby into alternative culture.
George and Nina swiftly become best friends, and in time their friendship comes close to approximating romantic love.
They have a mutual appreciation for junk food, and both of them are highly disorganized, somewhat lazy, and tend to hoard things.
Despite Nina's request that Howard remain unaware of the pregnancy for now, George unintentionally lets the secret out.
During the trip to Vermont, Joley reveals that he did not get tenure at Columbia, and asks George to move with him to Seattle, Washington.
During the Thanksgiving holiday, Paul travels to New York City to visit his mother, Molly, and spends some time with George.
Soon thereafter, George allows a mother going through a nasty divorce to take her son home at the end of the school day.
With Molly's encouragement, she has turned her life around by getting rid of clothes and mementos she has hoarded, and has begun work again on her dissertation.
Stephen Koch, a professor of literature at Columbia, suggested expanding the short story into a book-length novel.
"[1] Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, reviewing the novel for The New York Times, called it "very funny" and "exceptionally vivid".
Although she found the ending disappointed, she also noted it was "a final, bittersweet encounter [which] rounds out [a] novel...full of wonderful moments, gentle humor, and a happily jaundiced view of contemporary attitudes and inanities.
"[2] An anonymous reviewer in The Washington Post called it a "quaint and quirky novel" with "wry and witty thrust-and-parry writing", but felt that McCauley never explained the basis for George and Nina's love and that the ending left the reader without resolution.