In Kate Folk’s debut novel “Sky Daddy,” readers careen toward an uncertain destiny through the eyes of Linda, a woman who plans to dedicate her life to her erotic love of airplanes. “All planes are male,” Linda declares decisively. She longs for a plane to “marry” her — that is, kill her in a plane crash.
The book is set in San Francisco, where the author also lives. Folk was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford from 2019 to 2021. During that time, she workshopped the initial drafts of “Sky Daddy” with her fellowship cohort.
“Everyone was really excited about the project,” Folk told The Daily. “It did feel like a dangerous project, or something I felt a little weird about. Like, I don’t know if I should be writing this. Is this ridiculous?”
To Folk, I want to scream an emphatic, “No!” I smiled the entire time while reading “Sky Daddy.” I found protagonist Linda’s pursuit of happiness infectious and her unrelenting intensity quite relatable. I also spent the whole book hoping she would fall victim to an aviation fatality, creating a decisively unique tension.
Linda works as a content moderator and lives in a windowless in-law apartment. Her social connections mostly stem from her best friend Karina, who introduces her to the “Vision Board Brunch” (VBB) group — a group of successful women who come together four times a year for their eponymous brunch. Although Linda’s life conditions are “pretty bleak,” she is “actually someone who is pretty hopeful about her life,” said Folk.
In earlier drafts, Linda lived a more conventional life and narrated through a somewhat harsher voice, according to Folk. It was through “rereading ‘Moby Dick,’ about six months after I started working on the project, that I was just so struck by the voice of Ishmael,” said Folk, who sees the classic novel as a major influence. The novel is “fascinated with whales in the way that I imagine my book being fascinated with planes,” said Folk. “That gave me a new way into Linda’s voice and character.”
While I think Linda succeeded as a commanding Ishmael equivalent, the other characters in her orbit ultimately defined this book’s excellence for me. Linda’s friendship with Karina ebbs and flows in a way I found beautiful and true to life. Their bond embodies the adage that lovers come and go, but friends remain forever — except this time, the lovers are planes, and Linda literally watches them arrive and depart from SFO for hours at a time. Even though Linda longs for an airplane suitor to pursue her, it is Karina who rescues her in the end. Throughout the novel, it is Karina who brings human connection into Linda’s mechanized world.
Folk is fascinated by female friendships, attesting that they are “underwritten about.” The two central female characters in “Sky Daddy” fit together curiously: while Karina was popular (and an occasional bully) while growing up, Linda was a total misfit.
“To Linda, [Karina] is built up as this amazing person. Her approval would mean so much,” said Folk. Throughout the novel, Linda’s self-image walks the line of passivity without ever slipping into self-doubt. She is surprised when she receives a compliment; she rarely considers how she might benefit the lives of others. Yet she is strong: she goes after what she wants and proves over and over that she can connect with others in meaningful ways.
Folk described the broader scope of this mindset well. She sees Linda as “thinking in this self-centered way that is really common, that she is the only weird one and that everyone else has it all figured out. She sees through the course of the book that everyone has a lot of issues and doesn’t have it figured out.”
If the sexy planes didn’t convince you to read “Sky Daddy,” surely the deeply human truths that Folk exposes will.
Through the VBBs and Linda’s sense of being destined for airplane “marriage,” “Sky Daddy” raises questions of destiny and free will. Is Linda’s coincidental encounter with that airline CEO spurred on by her “manifesting’ practices? Or is there a pesky rational explanation pulling the strings? Ultimately, as readers, we always know the ending is predetermined — written out before we get to it. What is the role of the author in all this?
Folk said that the novel’s deterministic nature was emulative of its subject matter. “Getting on a plane feels like the ultimate surrender of one’s will,” she said. To her, flying is “a pure expression of the limitations” of one’s control over life.
It would be easy to sensationalize “Sky Daddy.” After all, it has strange obsession, inanimate lovers and total surrender to the powers of destiny. Linda surprises herself on every page, yet it all feels real. Linda’s friendship with Karina broke my heart and pieced it back together. Her fling with her work superior Dave depicted the crossing of life paths with accuracy and loveliness. Dave is older, and clearly not over his ex-wife. When Linda reencounters him weeks later, she finds a stronger and more fulfilled person.
People go through hard times, people grow apart and back together. Whether the outcome of destiny or free will, “Sky Daddy” is great because what it represents is just true.