45 pages • 1 hour read
How It Feels To Float
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Themes
The Dynamics of Grief and Loss
Content Warning: This section contains discussion of suicide, mental illness, sexual assault, and anti-gay language.
Biz says grief is like the urge to “lay your head down on the table where you are” (100) and never look back up. This expresses both the weight of grief and its allure because one can lose oneself in it. Biz struggles with these complex dynamics because, in addition to grief, she struggles with her developing sexual identity and a psychiatric condition that ultimately requires medication.
At the heart of Biz’s grief is the death of her father. One of the reasons she holds his presence so close—to the point that she visualizes his ghost—is that she identifies with him. When Biz was young, her father was a warm, vibrant person, but he also masked a steadily growing feeling of vulnerability and the inability to stay in control of events. Because of the suddenness of her father’s death and because it so completely lacked a satisfying explanation, Biz struggles to understand why she is alive. In the opening pages, when she cannot sleep, Biz places her hand over her heart and reassures herself with its steady beat: “It beatbeats beatbeatbeats skipsabeatbeatbeatbeatbeatbeats” (4). However, other times, she tries to exist somewhere between life and death, as when she imagines a multiverse in which she is and is not dead.
Finding the contradictions of living with grief overwhelming, Biz uses the coping mechanism of “floating” or disconnecting from her feelings and the outside world. She developed this habit after her father’s death, and it corresponds to her visions of his ghost always hovering nearby: “Years of Dad floating over beds and desks and couches, talking…blipping out if I spoke. I learned not to ask questions. Just to be glad when he came” (109). Biz did not develop these coping mechanisms consciously, but she accepted them as part of her life.
Biz’s family, friends, and doctor help Biz resolve her greatest conflicts around grief and loss. Medication stops her perception that things around her—her photographs, the ocean—are speaking to her, and Sylvia, Jasper, and her mother help her take part in life activities and rediscover her interests away from the toxic influence of her high school peer group. How It Feels to Float does not end with Biz’s full recovery; it frames accepting grief and loss as a lifelong process that is helped by having the support of loved ones and confidence in one’s ability to handle life’s challenges.
The Complex Question of Sexual Identity
One of Biz’s main struggles in the novel is with her sexual identity. When the novel opens, Biz has recently kissed her best friend Grace and worries about what it means. Later, when Grace asks Biz if she is gay, Biz does not know how to answer. Her situation is complicated when a classmate, Tim, sexually assaults her by reaching into her underwear while kissing her at the beach.
The only supportive presence she finds is her friend Jasper, whom she realizes is gay after he endures an incident of antigay harassment. When Biz and Jasper walk down the street in Temora, several kids in school uniforms shove past them and tell Jasper, “Watch it, faggot” (295). One of the kids spits on him. Jasper tells an enraged Biz to ignore them; “I’ve heard it before” (295). Biz suddenly understands that Jasper is gay and wonders, “How did I not catch it?” (295).
This incident underscores a hard reality that the novel explores, which is that heteronormative Australian culture fosters antigay sentiments and a predatory sexual atmosphere for both gay and straight young people. Grace represents the perspective of a heterosexual girl exploring her sexuality, and her classmates shame her for it. Grace says she kissed “five and half” boys (18), and none, she tells Biz, stirred the romantic feelings she thought kissing was supposed to ignite. Indeed, the half indicates a boy so drunk that when he started to kiss her, shoving his tongue in her mouth “like a frog” (19), he turned and threw up. After Grace has sex with a boy at the beach, her peers ostracize her. She retaliates, is suspended, and finally, her mother sends her to a different school far away.
When Grace asks Biz outright, “Biz, areyoubiorallthewaygay?” (20), the way the question is posed suggests the difficulty with which teenagers confront overt questions of sexual identity. Biz’s confusion about her sexuality is an element in her decision to float and avoid the question altogether, as it “makes [her] head fog” (21).
One of the goals of How It Feels to Float is to foster community and self-acceptance among LGBTQ+ youth. In the novel’s Afterword, Helena Fox writes, “Whoever you are, however you identify…here you are, here we are together, all of us deserving to live, love, and be loved, in freedom and equality.” She closes by quoting Lin-Manuel Miranda’s acceptance speech at the 2016 Tony Awards: “And love is love is love is love is love is love cannot be killed or swept aside.”
The Importance of Friendship
The importance of friendship is a popular theme in YA literature because social relationships are a key factor in young people’s understanding of themselves and others. In How It Feels to Float, Biz realizes that Grace and The Posse are not the sources of support she expected them to be, and Biz copes by camouflaging her emotions and trying to fit in. This only causes her to feel more isolated, and after her suspension, she give up on school entirely. Biz comes to realize the true value of friendship through her experiences with Jasper and Sylvia, each of whom embraces their differences and enjoy life on their own terms. Their comfort, support, and compassion encourage Biz along the way to her emotional and psychological recovery.
In Biz’s meeting with Jasper, Fox uses the tropes of YA romance; Jasper, the new kid with long hair who rides a motorcycle, could easily be a male protagonist in a teen romance while Biz, who fulfills certain “awkward girl” tropes, could be the female lead in such a narrative. However, Fox tells a more nuanced story of two young people bonding without romance as a motivating force. Both Biz and Jasper belong to the LGBTQ+ community and experience each other’s bodies without sexualizing them; Biz feels completely comfortable when they take off their clothes and play in the ocean half-naked “like dolphins” (118). Rather than bonding over sexual attraction, they bond over poetry and listening compassionately to each other’s stories. Even before Biz’s epiphany that Jasper is gay, their relationship offers a bond that is sustained not by sexual curiosity but rather by trust.
In addition, Biz finds friendship in the welcoming, nonjudgmental love of Sylvia, her 80-something photography classmate. It is a nontraditional, cross-generational friendship; Biz is drawn to Sylvia because of her energy, kindness, and sense of humor. In turn, Sylvia senses that Biz needs emotional support even though she is unable to ask for it. For most of the novel, Sylvia is the only adult who treats Biz as an equal and does not try to change her. Rather, Sylvia encourages Biz to do what she loves and facilitates Biz’s meeting with Jasper outside of school.
Sylvia and Jasper are Biz’s friends, but they are also her chosen family. A chosen family is comprised of people who are not related by blood, but who treat each other as family. Biz is at odds with her mother for most of the novel, and her family is a source of grief rather than support. Though Biz and her mother reconcile at the end of the novel, Biz particularly benefits from her relationships with Jasper and Sylvia. Those friendships create the emotional environment in which Biz finally recovers.
Intimacy and First-Person Narration
In fiction, the use of first-person narration creates intimacy between the reader and protagonist and enhances sympathy for the narrating voice; it is as if the character were speaking directly to the reader. The first-person perspective allows the reader to experience the story from inside the protagonist’s mind, giving the reader access to the protagonist’s experiences, biases, feelings, and logic. One of the most familiar examples of first-person narration is Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby (1925), which both Biz and Grace embrace as their favorite novel. In that novel, the reader sees everything through the perspective of Nick Carraway, an outsider to ultrawealthy lifestyle that his friend Gatsby and his cousin Daisy lead. Biz is also an outsider, and like Carraway, exposes the flaws of the society she observes.
In How It Feels to Float, the reader experiences Biz’s floating firsthand, and Fox uses literary devices such as fragmented prose, repetition, run-on sentences, ellipses, and removing the spaces between words to express the fluid but disjointed nature of Biz’s perception. Fox intends this intimacy to be emotionally challenging for readers, as when Biz wades into the ocean or in the room above the pub where she suffers her breakdown. In that instance, Fox gives nearly five pages of fragmentary elliptical phrases (322-27), climaxing with a page and a half of the question “Dad?” repeated more than 200 times. This unfiltered access to Biz’s struggle to process trauma offers a sympathetic portrayal of a mind struggling—and sometimes failing—to handle profound stress.
The first-person narration also gives the reader access to Biz’s poetic, artistic experience of the world, showing her powers of observation and creativity. Fox establishes the voice from the novel’s first page, which begins with Biz’s interior monologue on the subject of hearts: “A heart is a mystery and not a mystery. It hides under the ribs, pumping blood. You can pull it out, hold it in your hand. Squeeze” (3). This passage shows that Biz has an observant, logical side. She is complex character with strengths and vulnerabilities, and this comes through in the first-person perspective.
The first-person perspective is particularly effective when Biz is talking or thinking about her sexuality. When Grace asks Biz about her sexual identity, the reader experiences Biz intellectually and emotionally processing the question in real time. Despite her initial shock, she works through the question of whether she has a crush on Grace and realizes that, to her relief, she does not. She also answers Grace truthfully “I don’t know what I am” (21), in response to Grace’s question about Biz’s sexual identity. The first-person perspective provides Biz’s metacommentary on the conversation to show that her mind is working on multiple levels at once. Fox uses dialogue, italics, parenthetical statements, to show Biz’s complex feelings for her friend and the way Biz handles the stressful situation: After initially panicking, her “head clears” (21), and she can interact with Grace as a friend rather than a source of anxiety.
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