You could blame it on the recession, or on a generational refusal to “settle” for a well-paying but less-meaningful job.

Gurley’s not the only New Yorker testing his parents’ patience - and their credit-card limits. We were living in an apartment that’s about three times the rent that we’re paying now, but we kept getting behind on rent,” says Gurley, who now lives with Hilly in a “lovely, affordable two-room place in the south Slope,” which they pay for all on their own.

“My mother bailed us out a number of times. The financial aid continued even after the writer moved in with his then-girlfriend, now-fiancée, Hilly, in 2006. But as he got older, the money kept coming. Gurley first started accepting help from his mom - and her bank account - in his 20s, while making $50 a week at the New York Observer. “People are more comfortable talking about their sex lives than their finances.” “It’s the most embarrassing subject there is, and the last thing my mother wanted to read about,” admits Gurley, 43. But in his new memoir, “George & Hilly” (Simon & Schuster, $15), there was one subject that was difficult for the otherwise open writer to broach - the fact that he took monetary handouts from his mom well into his late 30s.

Hilarious, thought-provoking, and compelling, George & Hilly reveals the uncensored, unselfconscious psyche of a man on the brink of matrimony.Author George Gurley has written candidly about plenty of things over the years: his Metamucil dependency, his overdrinking. George can be compared to a Carrie Bradshaw 2.0 that is, if Carrie were a hard drinking, ill-reputed man-about-town writing frankly about sex, love, marriage, and his own psychological baggage. Selman: psychiatrist, obliging listener, and unwitting participant in George’s own journalistic project-a no-holds-barred portrait of intimacy taken from transcripts of the couple’s therapy sessions. George had witnessed New York husbands -frail, meek, ashamed, and henpecked, pushing double wide strollers as their battle-ax wives babbled on about “dinner with friends”-and it wasn’t for him.Įnter Dr. A funny and intimate portrait of a relationshipgleaned from the author and his fianceé’s couple’s therapy sessions.Īfter roughly three-and-a-half years of dating his girlfriend Hilly, New York Observer nightlife and society reporter George Gurley decided that it was time to get married.

George & Hilly by George Gurley