Trying to Float
A Memoir
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
“Hysterically droll, touching, elegant, and wise—a coming-of-age story from someone who possibly came of age before her parents” (Patricia Marx, New Yorker writer and bestselling author), Trying to Float is a seventeen-year-old’s darkly funny, warmhearted memoir about growing up in New York City’s legendary Chelsea Hotel.
Meet the family Rips: father Michael, a lawyer turned writer with a penchant for fine tailoring; mother Sheila, a former model and renowned sculptor who matches her welding outfits with couture; and daughter Nicolaia, a precocious and wry high school student at work on a highly unusual extracurricular activity, an official record of her peculiar childhood.
Nicolaia is a perpetual outsider who has struggled to find her place in schools populated by cliquish girls and loudmouthed boys. But at the Chelsea, Nicolaia she has found her tribe. There’s her neighbor Stormé, a tall albino woman who keeps a pink handgun strapped to her ankle; her babysitter, Jade, who may or may not have a second career as an escort; her friend Artie, former proprietor of New York’s most famous nightclubs. The kids at school might never understand her, but as Nicolaia endeavors to fit in, she realizes that the Chelsea’s motley crew could hold the key to surviving the perils of her adolescence.
“Nicolaia Rips is an old-soul sophisticate. Trying to Float is like Eloise meets Wes Anderson” (Elle), and not since Holden Caulfield has there been such a fabulously compelling teen guide to New York City. Rips’s debut is “charmingly self-deprecating and very funny…at once highly insightful and deeply familiar” (W Magazine), a triumphant parable for the power of embracing difference in all its forms. Her “engaging story with a big heart…will appeal to adults and teens alike” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Growing up in New York City is an adventure, but growing up in the city's famed Chelsea Hotel is an adventure that high school student Rips chronicles in her droll memoir. While it's not uncommon to be cramped for space in N.Y.C., Rips and her preoccupied but loving parents live together in a one-room apartment in a hotel that's known for its unusual characters. Rips was always more comfortable in the company of adults than children, and she spent most of her childhood friendless, hanging around hotel inhabitants such as the Mr. Crafties, two men who perpetually sat arguing in the lobby. She recounts failed attempts to join a variety of activities in her elementary school, most of them ending comically and badly. Her parents didn't seem to care that their daughter was the least popular girl in school. This changed in middle school when she found her own tribe of misfits. What doesn't change are Rips's indefatigable sense of humor about her own circumstances and her confidence. Readers will be impressed that this young author has written such a powerful memoir, and that she persevered through adolescence and her atypical upbringing to emerge as a strong, if eccentric, individual. This heartfelt memoir balances pathos and humor, proving that Rips, still only a senior in high school, is a promising writer who is wise beyond her years.
