Waiting for Ted

by Marieke Bigg

“After all these years, I was surprised to find that we were still in the process of trying to assemble two fully self-sustaining parts into one.”

Waiting for Ted charts the destruction of Rosalind and Ted’s relationship at the hands of an expensive chaise longue. Rosie comes from a wealthy, upperclass background. She dreams of being a traditional housewife to her big strong working man, cooking, tending the house and instagramming her perfect life. But she also needs to fill her house with things that she can Instagram, so when Ted bans her from spending any more of her father’s money on her ‘work’ as an interior design influencer until she’s actually earning, she begins to scheme – only to watch her schemes unravel, and the rest of her life with them.

Told in a series of reflections over the course of an evening spent waiting for Ted, Rosie charts her relationship’s downfall, how she drifted from her only friend (who she never really liked anyway), how she contributed to the breakdown in her parents’ marriage, how she never really let Ted into her perfect world, how she drove them to their spectacular breakdown, and as she does it becomes increasingly clear to the reader that Ted may not be coming home at all.

Genres: Fiction, Horror, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Audiobook, Womens, Adult

188 pages, Paperback

Published October 13, 2022

About the author

Marieke Bigg writes about bodies and culture. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge, where she studied the technological transformation of human reproduction. She now writes both non-fiction and fiction about the cultural dimensions of biology and bodies. In addition to her books, Marieke writes freelance, hosts podcasts and panels, and collaborates with scientists and biologists to discuss and produce art that conjures new social worlds.

Reviews

[Emily B · Rating 2 out of 5]

Audiobook. I couldn't really get into this one. The characters were one dimensional and cliche and the plot didn't interest me much either

[Queralt✨ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Rosie is waiting for Ted.
Rosie has spent £250,000 on furniture and she now is a true Instagram influencer.
Rosie is a #superwife.
Rosie, Ted is not coming anytime soon.

This was a very cool, confusing read. The chapters have the same structure: ‘Rosie is waiting for Ted’ and then flashbacks of their relationship and Rosie’s relationship with others. I think it would fit into the weird (horror?) lit genre and it’s a feminist, satirical take on relationships, Instagram, and yogi gurus. A bit of a cautionary tale of what happens when a woman becomes obsessed with household design and #traditionalfemininity social media.

This being said, it is a confusing read. Rosie is all over the place. The characters are all deranged, eccentric, and just plain unlikable. I’m not sure how I feel about the ending either, I was trying to guess what would happen in the end and it certainly surprised me, but I’m not sure I liked it.

"I am tall. I am magnificent; a voluptuous centrepiece amidst the dazzle of scintillating dust lifting me to the heavens. I am housewife. My pink, frilly apron bounces with fertility, its tie accentuating my waist, reminding you that these curves could bear your children. My hair is thick, locks cascading down my shoulders like a fountain of youth, framing a wide-eyed face that is at your service. I am superwife.

[Paula Rttjrs · Rating 4 out of 5]

#housewife #instalife #unhappymarriage #loneliness #emptylife #patriarchalviews #consumarism

Listen, I loathe absolutely every single character in this book. Everyone annoyed me to my core and that was exactly the point.

This book is a beautifully and well written commentary on modern life, highlighting the emptiness of social media and trying to achieve a perfect life for the outside world, while the true reality of it is anything but happy. Painting a painfully dark picture of the empty life many women still accept in this day and age: a loveless marriage and unfulfilled life, in which the main goal is to keep up appearances, all just so others might envy you for something that isn’t even real.

As a feminist you will hate the female characters even more than dickhead Ted. But it’s absolutely worth it.
This book stayed with me for weeks after.

I didn’t give it 5 stars solely because of the ending. While I get the authors choice for what is symbolizes, I had a different ending in mind towards the last view pages and was a little let down.

Don’t let that discourage you though. I feel like this book should be a new classic.

[Marie-Luise Goldmann · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderfully uncanny and bright novel about waiting, female passivity, social media and the worlds we construct around ourselves. As every chapter begins with Rosalind stating that she is waiting for her husband Ted to come home, the repetitive structure and the meaning the writer grants to little, seemingly irrelevant things like a chaise longue recalls Beckett or Kafka - a "Waiting for Godot", as the title rightly alludes, and "Metamorphosis" for the 21st century (the truly funny passages about the chaise longue even reminded me of Fontane's "Mathilde Möhring"). The novel hints at the horror genre or magic realism in a few instances, which makes it even more intriguing and captivating to read. If you liked "The Vegetarian" (Han Kang) and "Nightbitch" (Rachel Yoder), you will love "Waiting for Ted". "Waiting for Ted" gives the fairy tale "Little Red Riding Hood" an unexpected feminist twist, and in general makes you rethink a lot of things about gender and love that we usually take for granted. As the protagonist is an instagram influencer, the novel is clearly set in the present or future, but her desire for being the perfect housewife unsettles the time frames and asks how much the present in fact resembles the 60s or secretly wishes to return there. My favorite part is the fearless ending, but no spoilers here. Most importantly, the story is carried by a beautiful, rich language. Rarely are debut authors so bold and unflinching in setting their premises and inventing something new. A wonderful, truly special little gem!

[daniela weber · Rating 4 out of 5]

the illusion of an instagram 
perfect household is broken 
as the reader wonders what
might be wrong with a wife 
waiting for her husband. :x

[Maya Sophia · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked this up on a whim at a Foyles in London mostly because of that cover, but the premise sold me as well: A woman documents a night waiting for her significant other to come home and as she waits, she tracks the demise of their relationship at the hands of a chaise longue. It is absurdist and surrealist and darkly humorous. The author perfectly puts 1950s ideals of femininity in conversation with 2020s ideals of femininity. Bigg does a good job of showing how both eras are dependent upon perception of performed femininity and can only be validated by an outside gaze. Given that this is such a short book, I think that there's a lot of astute observations that will make me think about this for a long time to come.

[Rachel Louise Atkin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this so much but it felt really 'meh' to me. It is about a woman who is Instagram famous for having an aesthetic as a Stepford Wives-style 50s housewife, and she spends the majority of her time waiting for her husband, Ted, to come home so she can 'perform' this version of herself for him. Everything seems perfect in her life on the outside but as we get told more and more about Ted and how he mistreats her, the façade of perfection and fakeness she has built around her starts to crumble.

I started to enjoy this more near the end where her sense of reality really started to fall apart, and the structure of 'waiting for Ted' turned really sinister. But I felt like I wanted this to be a lot darker than it was. I wasn't a big fan of the whole Instagram thing and felt that the horror of it was really at odds with the moderness of smart phones and social media. I would have enjoyed if it was more Stepford Wives-y and had more of a horror angle to it like Mrs March or Motherthing does. Waiting For Ted fell really short of these novels for me. The writing felt a little flat for me at times as well and I didn't really feel a sense of character from the wife. I know the whole book is about her identity crisis but even in books like this I thing a strong sense of voice is important and to me the narrator just didn't have this which is why I think I found it underwhelming.

Would definitely read more from the author because I thought the ideas were really interesting and it started to pick up at the end, but this isn't a book I'll think about again much. I would recommend Mrs March or Motherthing instead of this as they are a lot stronger as novels.

[Victoria]

I was looking forward to this book forever. But I’m skimming waiting for it to be over.

I can’t keep waiting for Ted, I’m sorry. DNF.

[Katie Mcgovern · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book did not meet my expectations, and has left me confused and bemused about what it was! The fact I kept going to the end shows there was something rousing my interest, but I lost any sense of what the book was trying to say, do or make me feel. I think icky. In a bad way!

[Giulia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not sure how i feel. I struggle with books where social media plays a big role I find it hard to not cringe. But it was interesting and written well for the plot I think, a few moments were a bit too bizarre for me but probably great for those who appreciate literature on a more intellectual level than me.

[Maria · Rating 4 out of 5]

i could not have predicted the ending of this at all!

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably when one reads the title, Waiting for Ted, the title of Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot crops up in the mind and in a way, Waiting for Ted does gently echo it but Marieke Bigg adds another dimension to the story which I’ll get into.

As the book opens we are introduced to Rosie, she’s waiting for her partner Ted to come home, only the problem is that he hasn’t arrived yet. We then slowly find out about Rosie’s past and her relationship with Ted.

Rosie is an Instagram influencer but an insufferable one, she takes great care to present a fashionable looking house, this is ranging from antique furniture to pretty looking meals. She worries about the amount of followers, how many likes she receives, how to use hashtags properly and her followers perception of her. Rosie’s dialogue to Ted consists about her Instagram life as well. Ted is also well aware that Rosie spends a lot of her inheritance on keeping up appearances by purchasing the vintage furniture for her photos.

Things take a worse turn when she buys an expensive chaise longue and Ted loses his temper and storms out. This is crucial. There is another scene before which is also important when Rosie’s neighbour exposes her shallow media based lifestyle and Rosie can’t understand what the neighbour is saying and shuns her. Ironically when I saw videos and read reviews of Waiting… (this was after I drafted this review) I saw the same type of resistance was directed to this section.

Another important aspect of this book is social class: Rosie comes from a high class family, whose value systems are different than Ted’s, one main example which focused upon is Rosie’s dad’s love for hunting, something which Ted dislikes and Rosie is oblivious to. Already we see conflict between Rosie’s and Ted’s relationship.

Things take a turn when we finally find out why Ted is really missing and the story morphs from an existential tale to a gothic feminist one.

Waiting for Godot is a play about the banality of life and Rosie’s Instagram world perfectly embodies this philosophy. Even her love of hunting and the breakdown of her parent’s marriage (her dad runs off with a yoga instructor) all display the absurdities of life and how it flings them at us constantly. Yet for Rosie’s shallowness, Ted is no hero either: he is a bully and incapable of seeing things fairly, one of the final scenes of the book shows his crassness. His attitude is more on the lines of a person who victimised by this upper class 21st century woman. Ultimately it was his choice to live with her when he knew what he was in for. The novel does not take sides with it’s characters but rather gives two extreme points of view and how destructive they are. The ending differs from the play but at it’s core the themes are there.

Waiting of Ted is a clever satire which hits the reader hard with it’s complexity. Despite it’s brevity, the book says a lot, especially about the current culture we live in. I’ve always felt that literature to interpret and criticise the signs of the times and Waiting for Ted does that excellently.

[Maya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absolutely cannot write this review without mentioning what an excellent job Charlie Sanderson does narrating the audiobook. She is entirely responsible for how highly I've rated what would otherwise be a three star book. Her narration is incredible, capturing the characters, emotion, and tone to such a standard that I've rarely if ever heard from other audios. She maintains my attention through an otherwise flimsy narrative. I feel as though the plot loses (and somewhat finds) itself a number of times throughout the book, and the ending feels a little bit too out of left field for me to entirely enjoy it.

That being said, there are many things I've really enjoyed about this book. I really liked the narrative framing, I just wish that there was a bit more of a plot to string together what is otherwise a pretty strong story. The characters all feel fleshed out (and very intentionally annoying!!) and are great studies of the different ways generation, class, and gender interact. The writing style I find very fun, and it lends itself well to the often jokey tone of the book. It's really funny a lot of the time! I also really liked the discussions about gender, and I found that a lot of the time they hit very true, particularly around the ideas of always needing to perform. The social media themes fell a little bit flat for me though.

Overall a very enjoyable book and an excellent idea, that unfortunately a little too often feels like it doesn't know where it's going until it gets there

[David Johnston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Waiting for Ted is a very clever exploration of patriarchal expectations, social media performances, and social class. I’ve seen a few people compare this to Nightbitch and I would agree because of the way it handles the story of a stay-at-home wife/partner who can never quite get the validation they long for/deserve - like the MC in Nightbitch, Rosalind seeks validation from other sources but is more inclined to seek out liked and followers on Instagram rather than pretend to be a dog and sell Herbalife. This is a lot less unhinged than Nightbitch but it definitely loses a bit of stability towards the end when we see the true state of Rosalind and Ted’s relationship. The ending was a slap-in-the-face surprise in the best way and I thought it added that Moshfeghian bewildering that I’d been promised.

[evie · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 ☆ i’m too high for this

[Nicole Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 rounded up

this was a weird and wonderful little gem

I loved how this had a focus on the niche part of the internet where women conform to the traditional housewife life as an ironic stance to feminism, but how ultimately this is the main characters downfall. She was equal parts irritating and hilarious.

I absolutely loved Marieke Bigg’s mind and writing style and will definitely read any of their future releases. It lost stars as it started to become a little confusing toward the end for me.

[Girl Interrupted · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading this made me so grateful that I have self-esteem and a (relatively) healthy relationship with social media. But I love reading books about vapid, stupid people, so I had a great time. Really skilful writing; I feel like I've met (and hate) every character in this book. Extremely grateful it is just a book I can read and put down instead of mirroring my own life in any way.

[Frances · Rating 1 out of 5]

It was a struggle to finish. The protagonist is very hard to like, I finished the book mostly to see if she redeems herself so the bizarre twist at the end was a massive let down. I feel very sorry for Ted with the way Rosalind thinks about him.

[Dan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Simultaneously tried too hard and made no effort - a lot of lazy, played out tropes exacerbated by a tin ear for dialogue and a retiree's understanding of influencer culture. And who is watching Game Of Thrones in the year of our lord 2022?

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 ⭐ rounded - my god this was good.

[Grace · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s so frustrating to rate this 3 stars as the writing is so special in places. Especially the first half of the book.

Her face is disorientating, a prism of times and places, of colour and light. She is always ornamented. A quixotic collection on legs, a walking museum of empresses' jewels and pharaohs' bangles - so clad in distractions that I can never remember what she looks like. Only the emeralds of her eyes stick; they lurk in my subconscious with penetrating clarity.

I mean, come on. Parts of this are so good. I have so many parts like this highlighted.

Its just a shame. While this is supposed to be a caricature and (I think) a two dimensional, satirical quasi-horror rather than an in depth character study, some of it was just too flat to forgive. The characters weren’t great, but I couldn’t get past Ted and his family. The descriptions of his working class family ‘glugging beer between mouthfuls of sloppy roast dinners’, hating the posh girl and her posho things and how everyone in Ted’s family sounds like they’re a mixture between the orcs from LOTR and Vicky Pollard is insane. I think you can exaggerate stereotypes and for them to be funny and absurdist and come off clever, or you can get them really wrong and look the total opposite. I also think the story needed polish and tightening, especially for the last half. It did feel like in places there were two different brains writing this.

Definitely going to follow Marieke Bigg’s career with great interest and I will be tempted to pick up what she does next. I feel like with the right editor or guidance she could be a favourite

[Sam · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.9 ⭐
All in all this is not a bad book. Bigg invites us into the mind of one obsessed, vapid, privileged, "aesthetic over everything" influencer. The narration by Charlie Sanderson is really the adding to this obsessiveness. Manically listing each and every hashtag. (She also did a great job narrating "Am I Normal Yet?" by Holly Bourne.)

As someone who studied sociology and the "technological transformation of human reproductions", Bigg seems to be very knowledgeable on the topic, and I found myself chuckling while listening to the audiobook.

With social media and the trend of "weird books" and the success of "sadgirl books" there have been a few books I've read with characters similar to Rosalind.
I say this often, I don't mind unlikeable protagonists or the deplorable choices they make. It's fiction y'all.

It's just the structure that made it a really chaotic and confusing read for me. It was difficult for me to place each flashback correctly into the timeline. I caught myself not caring about the new pieces of information a few times. By the second half I thought it was really dragging for a book that's only 188 pages. I probably didn't pay enough attention anymore. So by the end I was just really confused and I'll probably forget about this book soon.

[Ashli Hughes · Rating 3 out of 5]

#TradWife #HomeOwner #TradWife #InteriorDesigner

I’ve been debating whether or not I wanted to read this for months and now I have, I’m like eh it was okay? I don’t think it’s a book that will stick with me and I don’t necessarily think it stands out within its chosen genre. I get what it was trying to do, combine the mundane lives of Instagram and relationships and perfectionism with the weird and out of world insane moments of obsession, transformation and needs taking over our entire body.

my issue is that the characters all felt very one dimensional, I think there is a way that you can create characters with similar mindsets and behaviours whilst still making them unique and individual by having them exhibit their own personhood- but in this they all blurred together. they were all annoying and insufferable and self centred, but it wasn’t in a thought provoking way bc they all mix together.

overall it was an okay book, I wasn’t bothered by it but I also don’t really feel different for reading it

[Heather White · Rating 3 out of 5]

What an interesting little book. In this novella a 30-something year old woman lives with her boyfriend, Ted. Each chapter of the book starts with Rosie stating "I'm waiting for Ted to come home," and the story spans over one evening while she waits and reminisces on the relationship as Ted's arrival becomes later and later.

This book had many very strong ideas. The ending was an absolute banger, and there were many powerful and well-done scenes throughout the book. Unfortunately, I found that some of the ideas in this story were a bit under-baked and scattered/a little bit disorganized. I feel as thought this book would have been stronger if it had focused on a major few themes rather than jumping around all over the place. That being said, this was enjoyable, provocative, and highly unique. If you're in the mood for a bizarr0-feminist take on the role of the housewife, I'd recommend this.

[paula. · Rating 3 out of 5]

HMM

i’ll be so honest, this should’ve been a short story, maybe then the ending would’ve worked for me. but this way there was so much build up (it was a fast read but for 180 pages, it dragged) for essentially nothing

i enjoyed the commentary and the consistent image of body = art = commodity = object, bigg is a fantastic technical writer and knows how to construct beautiful, impactful sentences, but in general i just felt a lot of /eh/

before starting, i also thought this book takes place in the 50s (probably because of the cover) so when instagram was mentioned for the first time i was very surprised. the general timeline is also quite confusing? it doesn’t quite seem to make sense.

[jill · Rating 4 out of 5]

every character is unbearable & it’s the perfect way to get the author’s point across. rosie is unhinged, waiting for ted in many senses, from the divisive chaise lounge in their living room. the confusing events and timelines of this book do a great job of showing how disconnected relationships can be and how truly nothing is as it seems, especially on social media. i didn’t see this one ending the way it did, it’s out-there!!

[Dave Musson · Rating 3 out of 5]

This had so much going for it…the premise, the cover, the narrator, the repetitive structure to start each chapter that just nudged up the dread each time. But then the ending happened and I just don’t understand it. Like, I genuinely don’t comprehend what happened - literally not understanding it, rather than just being baffled by an artistic choice.

🤷🏻‍♂️🤷🏻‍♂️🤷🏻‍♂️

[Emma Rose · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reminded me a bit of Ottessa’s books, all the characters were terribly unlikeable
I didn’t like the ending at all, I get she’s losing sense of reality and symbolism but I think it could’ve been done better

[Coro · Rating 5 out of 5]

"It's funny that what in a friendship people say is co-dependent, in a romantic relationship is called love."

Waiting for something or someone to change will turn you to stone. Caring so much about one thing that it becomes your entire being is dangerous.

[Ashleigh · Rating 2 out of 5]

bruh, i'm confused..