What do you think?
Rate this book
Cultivating Mad Cow
Sat in a row in a call centre in an unassuming new build office on the outskirts of Oxford, Barry White, a forty nine year old slightly balding diabetic telephone counsellor, was putting in his usual eight hour shift. Little did he know that his life was going to change forever.
Cultivating Mad Cow is a true story that could easily be described as a memoir, but it’s more than that, it’s a story about madness, love, desperation, tragedy and recovery. Rich with comic moments, which against the backdrop of so much despair and anguish makes it both a comical but at the same time a heart-breaking read.
New to writing, Kathryn brings a unique unsanitised, voice to tell the profoundly disturbing story of a woman trying to hold it all together, working in child protection and dealing with an unknown serious mental health condition.
Things start to go badly wrong when Kathryn goes off work on annual leave and she is unaware she is having a mental health episode. With her wheelie bin going missing and with the new found desire to build phallic objects in her garden and get herself arrested for outlandish and hilarious public disturbances, Kathryn is offered support in the form a telephone counsellor by the name of Barry White.
As the weeks progress and with little help on the ground, Kathryn begins to form a romantic attachment to Barry and creates a world where only he and she exist. As Barry writes his case notes, she writes her book. Her increasing need to be near Barry and decreasing inhibitions lead to disaster when she sends him inappropriate material which he shares with his manager, leading to them to terminate all contact between her and Barry.
Undeterred by this latest turn of events, she purchases a lighthouse made from resin, throws it in her clapped out Nova, abandons her daughter and sets off to Oxford in search of Barry. When Barry fails to show up in a church which she believed the universe had led her to, she is mortified. The truth that Barry is not telepathically connected to her and that there is no great master plan created by a higher force to bring them together, is too much to bear and she returns home sinking into a darker, more disturbing state. With Barry gone and a career in tatters, she decides to return to work with devastating consequences.
Cultivating Mad Cow is a true story that could easily be described as a memoir, but it’s more than that, it’s a story about madness, love, desperation, tragedy and recovery. Rich with comic moments, which against the backdrop of so much despair and anguish makes it both a comical but at the same time a heart-breaking read.
New to writing, Kathryn brings a unique unsanitised, voice to tell the profoundly disturbing story of a woman trying to hold it all together, working in child protection and dealing with an unknown serious mental health condition.
Things start to go badly wrong when Kathryn goes off work on annual leave and she is unaware she is having a mental health episode. With her wheelie bin going missing and with the new found desire to build phallic objects in her garden and get herself arrested for outlandish and hilarious public disturbances, Kathryn is offered support in the form a telephone counsellor by the name of Barry White.
As the weeks progress and with little help on the ground, Kathryn begins to form a romantic attachment to Barry and creates a world where only he and she exist. As Barry writes his case notes, she writes her book. Her increasing need to be near Barry and decreasing inhibitions lead to disaster when she sends him inappropriate material which he shares with his manager, leading to them to terminate all contact between her and Barry.
Undeterred by this latest turn of events, she purchases a lighthouse made from resin, throws it in her clapped out Nova, abandons her daughter and sets off to Oxford in search of Barry. When Barry fails to show up in a church which she believed the universe had led her to, she is mortified. The truth that Barry is not telepathically connected to her and that there is no great master plan created by a higher force to bring them together, is too much to bear and she returns home sinking into a darker, more disturbing state. With Barry gone and a career in tatters, she decides to return to work with devastating consequences.
241 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 25, 2015
7 people are currently reading
31 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 4, 2016
Kathryn, I ❤️❤️❤️❤️ your book! I share some of your experiences and wish you nothing but well from here onwards in your life. A brave brave woman!
May 2, 2018
This book is a crazily mad mixed up life splashed into a giant puddle of chaos and energetically stirred by a psychotic social-worker mum who loves to write and who loves a man in a call centre she has never met. It is an amazing read, a few pages in and you are living the life of a desperately ill woman who behaves insanely and is in a state of energetic freefall with no one managing to give her any meaningful support. As someone who is familiar with observing psychosis it made total sense and it made me laugh and it made me cry. I recommend it.
June 8, 2019
Astounding
This was by far the most real,engaging and emotional book I have read in a very long time. I was taken along on the whole journey with the author going through many emotions with her. It’s an incredible story and has given me some understanding around around suicide and bipolar that I am grateful for.
This was by far the most real,engaging and emotional book I have read in a very long time. I was taken along on the whole journey with the author going through many emotions with her. It’s an incredible story and has given me some understanding around around suicide and bipolar that I am grateful for.
November 11, 2015
The adage that that everyone has a novel in them is rather old and tiresome. Everyone lives a life, and to them that life is interesting. It is very likely they had mountains to climb and demons to tackle — that is part of being a human after all. The question is whether that story is going to be entertaining enough for people to want to buy it and devote time to it. There are many such self-published personal stories — self-published for a very good reason: they were interesting for the author to write, and possibly for their friends and family to read, but that’s it. They may well have proved therapeutic for the author. None of that is to say they should never have been published, however. There is a niche for such things.
Cultivating mad cow is not in that category of memoir. It is well written and is engaging. The life journey of the author has been far from an ordinary one — being on the very extremes of human experience. It will make you question life and what it means to you, as you follow Kathryn’s story. It is not a light read, though it is funny to in a tragicomedy sort of way. I started reading it whilst under pressure at work and feeling a little stressed, and had to stop as it was freaking me out a bit, so I read The Water Babies instead, returning to Cultivating Mad Cow when I was on a more even keel.
I mentioned funny bits — I believe we have the author’s permission to laugh, even though it is in a slightly uncomfortable way as it is humorous in a mad sort of way — literally. You question whether you are laughing with and not at the protagonist.
It makes you start to question the meaning of mental illness and normality and just how thin the divide between them is. It is a book with a happy ending however. I make no apologies for that spoiler —read it, learn from it, enjoy it and take comfort from knowing it will all work out in the end.
You could describe it as a muesli bar of a book — it has something to chew on, is good for you, but still enjoyable. It is certainly not a marshmallow book — full of air, cloying and lacking in substance.
Cultivating mad cow is not in that category of memoir. It is well written and is engaging. The life journey of the author has been far from an ordinary one — being on the very extremes of human experience. It will make you question life and what it means to you, as you follow Kathryn’s story. It is not a light read, though it is funny to in a tragicomedy sort of way. I started reading it whilst under pressure at work and feeling a little stressed, and had to stop as it was freaking me out a bit, so I read The Water Babies instead, returning to Cultivating Mad Cow when I was on a more even keel.
I mentioned funny bits — I believe we have the author’s permission to laugh, even though it is in a slightly uncomfortable way as it is humorous in a mad sort of way — literally. You question whether you are laughing with and not at the protagonist.
It makes you start to question the meaning of mental illness and normality and just how thin the divide between them is. It is a book with a happy ending however. I make no apologies for that spoiler —read it, learn from it, enjoy it and take comfort from knowing it will all work out in the end.
You could describe it as a muesli bar of a book — it has something to chew on, is good for you, but still enjoyable. It is certainly not a marshmallow book — full of air, cloying and lacking in substance.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews