Outside Providence

By Peter Farrelly

Book Overview

Outside Providence is a hilarious yet melancholy novel of a young man's coming of age in the 1970s. When Timothy Dunphy, native of working-class Pawtucket, Rhode Island, is packed off to a fancy prep school, he finds that the privileged elite is hardly immune to life's screwups. Dunphy must reconcile his pedigreed schoolmates with his mongrel friends back home--including Drugs Delaney, whose diet consists mainly of vitamin Qs (Quaaludes), and Bunny Cote, who thinks New England is a state.

Not far below Dunphy's comic demeanor churn powerful fears of abandonment by those he loves best: his mother, his girlfriend, and his closest friend. And he must come to terms with his complex relationship with the person he hates most, his father. As he struggles to live with the paradox of somehow loving the same man he blames for his family's tragedies, Dunphy begins to understand and accept life's betrayals, and learns how to trust in love.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385490585
• ISBN13: 9780385490580
• Release Date: October 1998
• Publisher: Main Street Books
• Length: 212 Pages
• Weight: 0.53 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Fabulous

I thoroughly recommend this book. It made me laugh and cry, but oh how it made me laugh.If you don't read this and laugh you must be dead!It should remind you of how you looked at life as a teenager.

A Prep School Kid's Opinion

There are so many books and movies about prep school life, but Outside Providence is by far the best. It is a wonderful exaggeration of what life is like coming from a lower class background and jumping into the strange and unique world of prep school. I have never read such an honest book in my life and I think that every person who goes to prep school should read this book. It puts things into prospective. Since I am a prep school kid, I can relate so easily to everything that Farrelly writes. I'm not so sure how much people outside of the prep school world would enjoy this book, but I don't see how anyone wouldn't!

best book i ever read

this book is a great book that rightfully deserves the production into a movie. i can't wait till the movie comes out. i have also read farrelly's comedy writer and believe that both are terrific. outside providence was able to show how teenagers feel and what they do. it sort of reminded me of dazed and confused. i recommend this book to anyone and everyone. but now i can't find a book that fits my raised standards since i have read this book.

a wonderful compelling story.

peter farrely has done it all, a great book (outside providence) three absolutely hilarious films, and a great thinker. i would reccomend this to any one. I have to agree this is as good as the comedy writer.

Excellent, Humorous 70's coming-of-age story

Although this book is by the director of "Dumb & Dumber" & "Kingpin", which were funny in a rather juvenile fashion, "Outside Providence" is a moving, heartfelt, semi-autobiographical first novel. The novel chronicles the coming-of-age of Tim Dunphy, an poor Irish high school student from Pawtucket, RI. When his father ships him off to a private school in New England, his personal journey of love, discovery and betrayal begins.