Australian author Helena Fox’s debut novel How It Feels to Float (2019) explores sexuality, mental illness, and grief through the story of Elizabeth Martin Grey, aka Biz, a 16-year-old who lost her father when she was seven. The novel was a YA international bestseller and was chosen as a Kirkus Review Best Book of the Year and a Chicago Public Library Best of the Best of the Year. It was also awarded Australia’s prestigious Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction, the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Young Adult fiction, and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Children’s/Young Adult Literature. How It Feels to Float is also widely popular among the online BookTok community.

Content Warning: This guide contains profanity, descriptions of suicide, mental illness, and anti-LGBTQ+ language and behavior that are present in the source text.

This study guide references the 2019 Dial paperback edition of the novel.

Plot Summary

The novel is written in short, unnumbered chapters and is narrated Biz’s first-person present-tense voice.

Elizabeth Martin Grey, “Biz,” is a 16-year-old high school junior in Wollongong, New South Wales. When the novel opens, it is 3:00am, and she cannot sleep. She talks with her father, who has been dead for nearly 10 years and seems to be sitting in the room with her.

At school the next day, Biz worries about her growing infatuation with Grace that culminated in an awkward but passionate kiss at Grace’s pool a few days ago. Biz often feels like a balloon floating gently above her own life. She keeps her struggles to herself and tries to appear as if everything were fine.

A new kid, Jasper Alessio, arrives in school. Jasper has longish hair over his eyes and walks with a limp; Biz finds him intriguing. The week he arrives, there is a beach party. Biz, momentarily mesmerized by the waves, walks into the surf. Just as the undertow grabs at her, Jasper pulls her out of the ocean.

At another beach party three weeks later, a drunk kid named Tim tries to make out with Biz, but she rejects him and even throws up on him. Later, she is stunned to find out that Tim tells his friends they had sex. Rumors circulate in school that Biz is promiscuous, which makes her angry. When the same group of friends spreads similar rumors about Grace, Biz and Grace sneak out and throw a rock through the front window of one of the kids’ houses.

As a result, Biz and Grace are suspended from school. Grace’s parents immediately enroll her in a new school, but Biz cannot face returning to school after her suspension ends. Instead, she begins to drift. Concerned, her mother brings in a psychologist who counsels Biz to let go of the past and her father’s death. The doctor suggests Biz take a night class, which she does. In a photography class, Biz meets Sylvia, who is in her eighties. Attracted by Sylvia’s joy and energy, Biz becomes friends with her. Only later does Biz find out that Sylvia is Jasper’s grandmother.

Biz discovers the photos she takes actually talk to her; their subjects, whether they are objects, houses, or people, tell her their stories. Sylvia tells Biz that Jasper, who left school to undergo surgery and rehab on his leg, plans to return to school. Despite Sylvia’s friendship and her growing fascination with photography, Biz still feels empty and sad. More disturbingly, she is prone to sudden and paralyzing panic attacks.

Biz turns 17. She and Jasper have become friends; they spend time together on the beach, but the relationship never turns sexual. Jasper, as Biz confirms later, is gay. With him, Biz feels comfortable and secure, but she never confides in him about her father and his visits. At one point, Biz approaches Jasper with a plan to reconnect with her father: She wants to go to Sydney to visit the apartment where her parents lived when she was born. Jasper agrees to take her on his motorcycle.

After the trip, Biz is convinced she needs to return to her father’s boyhood home, a sheep farm in Temora, about 500 miles inland on the edges of the Outback. Biz does not tell her mother but emails Jasper that she is leaving. She takes the train and is stunned when, halfway to Temora, Jasper is waiting for her at a train station. At the sheep farm, Biz discovers unsettling truths about her father’s life: Her grandfather drowned under suspicious circumstances after his wife ran off with his uncle. After learning this, Biz believes that own father died in similar manner, by drowning himself, when the responsibilities of being a new parent became too much.

The impact of these revelations overwhelms Biz, and she ends up in a psychiatric hospital. Her mother and Jasper are both there. Grace visits, and the two reconcile. With the help of her family and friends, Biz finally opens up about her father and his visits. She says goodbye to him and watches as he fades away. With a new medication and the support of her family and friends, Biz begins to feel stronger and regains her interest in photography. In the end, she finds comfort understanding that life is both wonderful and terrible but that she cannot wait to see what happens next.