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.