Trying to Float: A Memoir
“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).
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Trying to Float: A Memoir
“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).
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Trying to Float: A Memoir

Trying to Float: A Memoir

by Nicolaia Rips
Trying to Float: A Memoir

Trying to Float: A Memoir

by Nicolaia Rips

Paperback

$17.99 
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Overview

“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).

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781501132995
Publisher: Scribner
Publication date: 06/13/2017
Pages: 272
Product dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.38(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Nicolaia Rips is a freshman at Brown University (class of 2020). She has lived at the Chelsea Hotel for her entire life. In her spare time, she studies vocal music, participates in team sports, reads avidly, and tolerates her parents. Trying to Float is her first book.

Read an Excerpt

Trying to Float

  • MY FIRST TRIP

    EIGHT YEARS INTO my parents’ marriage, my mom discovered that she was pregnant. This seemingly joyous event was dented by my dad’s denial that such a terrible thing could happen to him. Convinced that he wasn’t responsible, he accused my openly gay godfather, Tom, of fathering the child.

    My mom was an extraordinary traveler, and though excited about the pregnancy, feared that a baby would signal the end of her journeys. She began to plan a trip to Iran.

    Because she needed a visa to get into Iran and couldn’t get one in the United States, she flew to London and applied for her visa there. She was five months pregnant.

    In London, the Iranian consulate informed her that a visa could take months. Never one to wait around, she decided to travel the Uzbek silk road while waiting for her visa to arrive in Tashkent. An Iranian doctor in London gave her a note that said she could travel until seven months pregnant. With this, she and I were off.

    Back in New York, my dad refused to admit that he had a wife, much less a daughter on the way. This fantasy came to an end when he picked up his mail to find a postcard from a grinning woman, with a swelling belly, firing off automatic weapons with a group of equally happy Uzbek men. The caption read, “Enjoying the afternoon with your daughter!”

    Acknowledging the imminent arrival of his daughter, my father, who had previously handled my mother’s trips to the most dangerous parts of the world by confining himself to a two-block radius that included the Chelsea Hotel, his favorite café, and his barber, now added visits to a psychiatrist to the mix. What she thought of his reflections on his childhood in Nebraska, vivid and unexpected, like pimentos in the center of olives, I dare not imagine.

    On July 19, exactly four weeks before I was born, my father opened the door to find a woman wearing a burka. When my mother went into labor at St. Luke’s–Roosevelt Hospital, my dad was finally forced to venture outside his circle of comfort. Having done so—and meeting me—he realized it wasn’t so bad out there.

  • Table of Contents

    Prologue xvii

    The Fledgling Years

    My First Trip 3

    Italy 5

    Preschool 7

    The Pool Party 15

    The Crafties 19

    Halloween 23

    My Steed 27

    Pippi 33

    Eyes 39

    Stormé 45

    But Not the Fish 49

    A Leg Up 53

    A Crush 57

    Artie 63

    My Babysitters 69

    The Theater 77

    Rebecca 83

    Winter Valley 89

    The Traitor 97

    My Friend Fan 109

    The Traitor Revealed 113

    Middle School

    The Sewer and the Cutter 123

    The Delicacy of Love 127

    Friendship and Chocolate 131

    Greta Returns 135

    Moving On 139

    King of the Night 145

    The Studio 149

    My Crowd 153

    The Schnoz 161

    Mom vs. Mama 167

    The Dance 173

    The Shaman 179

    Tic-Tac-Toke 183

    Summer Camp 191

    An Unexpected Journey 205

    My Interested Look 209

    Cinderella 215

    The Banana Peels of Optimism 223

    The Playing Fields of West Chelsea 237

    Mr. Crafty Moves Out 243

    At Last 245

    Author's Note 251

    Acknowledgments 253

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