45 pages • 1 hour read
Helena FoxHow It Feels To Float
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Genre Context: YA Fiction and Mental Health
How It Feels to Float is an example of a growing subgenre of YA fiction that explores the special challenges teenagers face in coping with mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, and panic attacks. Although fiction has long examined characters with mental health issues—such as in the stories of Edgar Allan Poe and the novels of Virginia Woolf—special attention to the experiences of young adults began with J. D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), about a teenager named Holden Caulfield who ends up in psychiatric care after struggling with angst and alienation. Another example is Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar (1963), the semiautobiographical account of Esther, who struggles with psychosis and depression. The novel was published just months before Plath would die by suicide. The Bell Jar is especially relevant to How it Feels to Float because it is a novel Biz is assigned to read for her English class.
More recent examples, such as Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999), Jay Asher’s Thirteen Reasons Why (2013), and Erin Stewart’s The Words We Keep (2022), investigate teenager characters who struggle with feelings of isolation, sadness, and emotional and spiritual emptiness. Many stories feature topics such as social media and peer pressure, eating disorders, the pressure of competition in school and athletics, racism, dysfunctional families and divorce, puberty and sexuality, grief, and loss. These stories offer readers who may wrestle with similar anxieties—or know someone who does—the reassurance that they are not alone and have strategies available for coping. Part of the goal of YA novels about mental health is intervention. In her Author’s Note, Helena Fox offers links to government networks and outreach programs for teens in need of help.
Authorial Context: Helena Fox and Autofiction
How It Feels to Float is a semi-autobiographical novel. In the Author’s Notes, Fox acknowledges her own experience with mental health issues, such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), anxiety disorders, depression, and dissociative disorder. In addition, she acknowledges that she was raised by two mothers, and that within her family she has extensive experiences with the LGBTQ+ community. She argues that this emotional environment taught her tolerance and compassion and convinced her early on that everyone deserves the chance to love and to be loved.
Similarly, the character of Biz is never given a specific emotional context for her anxieties, depression, and dissociative moments save the death of her father (most likely but never for certain ascribed to his own actions) nor does the novel close with any specific diagnosis or treatment plan that Biz will follow. In keeping the specifics general and the recovery treatment open, the book allows the character and her mental health challenges to become less particular and more applicable to a wider variety of YA readers.
In interviews around the publication of How It Feels to Float and in postings on her website, Fox discusses the importance of writing and self-expression as tools to help young adults handle mental health challenges. Biz discovers this kind of creative therapy in her talent for photography. Fox argues that although prescription medication and clinical care can be crucial in a patient’s recovery, a supportive network of friends and family is the greatest key to someone managing their mental health. In using her own story of mental health crisis and recovery as a template for Biz’s, Fox assures readers that mental health issues do not need to define a person and that, though achieving wellness is not easy, it is possible.
