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• Sky Daddy - 2025 Random House, New York, NY

• Kate Folk website - https://www.katefolk.com/

  Kate Folk is the author of a novel, Sky Daddy (Random House 2025), which has been longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel prize and named a best book of the year (so far) by Time, Vox, and Vulture. Her short story collection, Out There (Random House 2022), was a finalist for the California Book Award in First Fiction. Her stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, n+1, One Story, Granta, and The Baffler, among other venues. A former Stegner Fellow, she’s also received fellowships from MacDowell, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and Willapa Bay AiR. Originally from Iowa, she lives in San Francisco.

• - https://www.usfca.edu/faculty/kate-folk

  Kate Folk
  Adjunct Professor
  Part-Time Faculty
  kmfolk1@usfca.edu
  Personal Website
  Socials
  On This page
  Biography
  Education
  Awards & Distinctions
  Biography
  Kate Folk is an author, screenwriter, and educator based in San Francisco. Her debut novel, Sky Daddy, is forthcoming from Random House in 2025. Her story collection, Out There (2022), was a finalist for the California Book Award in First Fiction. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Granta, Zyzzyva, and The Baffler, among other venues. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, she’s also received fellowships and residencies from MacDowell, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and Willapa Bay AiR.

  Education
  University of San Francisco, MFA in Creative Writing, 2011
  New York University, BA in Individualized Study, 2007
  Awards & Distinctions
  Stegner Fellowship in Fiction, 2019

  MacDowell Fellow, 2017

  Headlands Center for the Arts Affiliate Artist, 2016

• Parnassus Musing - https://parnassusmusing.net/2025/04/17/kate-folk/

  Look Up: An Interview with Kate Folk
  Posted onApril 17, 2025

  Dear Reader,
  Have you ever had a thought or habit so shameful, so plainly weird, you could never dream of speaking it out loud? Trust me, reader, our main character Linda has you beat. Follow along on this absurdly salacious story of a woman whose erotic obsession with planes is derailing her whole life. You will gasp, you will gawk, but I believe if you let yourself, you will also see seeds of your own reflection. Sky Daddy has been my most anticipated release of 2025, and I could not have been more thrilled to chat with Kate Folk about this perfectly unhinged and beautiful book.
  — Maddie Grimes, Parnassus bookseller

  Kate Folk | Photo by Andria Lo
  Maddie Grimes: Before Sky Daddy came out, I was a huge fan of your short story collection, Out There. I’m curious if Sky Daddy ever started out as a short story, or what made you realize that this premise was different and that Linda was a character you wanted to spend 350 pages with?

  Kate Folk: I always knew this one was a novel. I felt like there was so much to explore in the idea of a woman who’s sexually obsessed with airplanes. I thought of it as a study of a fascinating, flawed character, similar to some of my favorite first-person narrated books, such as Lolita, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and Convenience Store Woman. While I typically think of a short story as focusing on one moment or incident in a character’s life, I wanted this story to have room to meander. I believe that the ideal form of a story is embedded in its DNA, and as a writer my task is to find that form.

  MG: Sky Daddy falls into this subgenre of unhinged female main characters that really seems to be having a moment in the spotlight right now. For you as a writer, does the increased popularity of these “unhinged” books give you more freedom to explore and push boundaries, or do you feel constricted, like there is more pressure to compare yourself to others?

  KF: I’m a fan of many of those books, though I try not to think in marketing terms while writing. I think the term is useful in bringing readers to the book who will potentially be into it, but it can backfire in that it creates an expectation for them that the book never set out to fulfill. For instance, I’ve seen some people wanting it to be “more unhinged.” I do like that there is such an appetite for these books—particularly for books about weird, complicated women. In years past, there’s been discourse around the “unlikeable woman” in fiction. Readers have had less tolerance for weird, messy, or otherwise “unlikeable” female characters, while embracing male anti-heroes in all forms. It seems like that is changing now, which is great to see. I always found the imperative for characters to be “likeable” to be strange, anyway. To me, it’s far more important for a character to be interesting than to be likeable.

  MG: When I was reading this book I realized how much terminology and jargon actually exists about airplanes that I was completely ignorant to, but of course for Linda all of this lingo is like a natural second language to her. What was your research process like for Sky Daddy?

  KF: In writing this novel, I didn’t need to be an expert about aviation, but I needed to get close to Linda and her obsession. Linda follows planes furtively, using the internet and apps, and I did the same. I wrote the book over a period of four years or so, and that whole time, I felt like I was seeing the world through Linda’s eyes, even when I wasn’t actively working on the book. I downloaded a flight-tracking app, and would always look up planes I saw flying above me, to see what type of plane they were and where they were headed. I became like Linda, my gaze fixed to the sky. The most intensive research for the story itself involved a later part of the book, when Linda takes many flights in quick succession. It was surprisingly difficult to figure out what a particular plane’s daily schedule might be, and to imagine how someone would go about booking multiple flights on it.

  MG: Beyond its attention-grabbing premise, what I love most about Sky Daddy is what I see at its heart. To me, what’s so special about this book is that each one of us has our own private inner worlds and thought lives that we would never want to share with another person, and reading Linda’s story gives us a kind of permission to bring these hidden parts of ourselves to the forefront, acknowledge them, and understand that we are not so alone after all. Can you speak to this aspect of the novel and how Linda might be a more relatable character than people would expect?

  KF: Yes, I think that’s a great reading of the book. While I don’t share Linda’s desire for planes, I channeled my own feelings to write her character. In a way she is a vessel for some of my feelings of being on the outside of “normal” society, looking in. I think many of us can relate to her in how she feels a bit alienated and like she is constantly
  performing a role, either to get people to like her or to escape being judged. Her desire for planes can be read as any unusual desire that we are ashamed to admit to.

  MG: Another interesting theme for me as a reader was how Linda’s obsession with planes is really intertwined with her isolation. Linda is a deeply lonely woman, and I wonder if in your mind this loneliness is caused by her secret obsession, or is it the other way around? How can these two traits fuel each other?

  KF: Linda is very isolated, but I’m not sure she feels lonely most of the time, or at least, she isn’t quite aware of how lonely she might feel if she allowed herself to. I think she would like to have more connection with other people—and gradually accomplishes this over the course of the novel—but any potential loneliness is compensated for by her joyful connection with planes. I think she also sees solitude as the price she must pay to continue pursuing what she believes to be her destiny. Linda has a spiritual outlook on her life, realizing her time on earth is only temporary, and prioritizing the eternal over the day-to-day.

  MG: Obviously I’m obsessed with your work; so I want to know what’s next from you! Is there anything you’re working on now you can hint to, or goals for future projects?

  KF: Thank you! I’m working on another novel that’s very different from my previous work. It’s set in the early 1990s in Iowa, and the main character is an insurance salesman. I’m thinking of it as a suburban noir.

  MG: Thank you so much again for taking time to answer my questions! To close, we always end with this: What is your favorite thing about independent bookstores?

  KF: Independent booksellers have such evident passion for books. I love how every store is unique, and booksellers are so creative in setting up displays and staff picks sections. Independent bookstores’ enthusiasm for Sky Daddy has been incredible. As an author, it makes it all feel worth it.

• Wikipedia -

  Kate Folk

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  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  This article possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. (April 2025) (Learn how and when to remove this message)
  Kate Folk

  Born Iowa City, Iowa, US
  Occupation Novelist, short story writer, essayist, college professor
  Language English
  Genre Literary fiction, horror, non-fiction
  Notable works Out There (2022)
  Sky Daddy (2025)
  Notable awards Stegner Fellow
  Kate Folk is an American author of short stories, novels and essays.

  Her book of short stories, Out There, was published in 2022, was a finalist for the California Book Award in First Fiction.[1] and was named a best book of the year by Kirkus Reviews, the Chicago Review of Books, and Jezebel. It has been translated into Korean and Spanish.

  In 2020, it was announced that Folk was developing a television show with Sharon Horgan for Hulu[2] A feature screenplay written by Folk was selected for the 2024 Black List.[3]

  Her debut novel, Sky Daddy, was published in 2025.

  Life
  Kate Folk was born in Iowa City, IA. From 2019 to 2021, she was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University.[4]

  Folk has received fellowships and residencies from MacDowell (2017),[5] Willapa Bay AiR (2023),[6] the Vermont Studio Center (2014 and 2016), and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (2013). From 2016 to 2019, she was an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts[7]

  Folk has published short stories in The New Yorker, McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Zyzzyva, Granta, The Baffler, Conjunctions, and One Story, among others.

  She has also published essays and criticism in the New York Times Magazine,[8] the New York Times Book Review,[9] and Literary Hub[10]

  Bibliography
  Fiction
  Sky Daddy (2025) Random House. ISBN 978-0593231494[11][12][13]
  Out There (2022) ISBN 978-0593231463[14]
  Short Stories
  "Out There[15]"
  "The Bone Ward[16]"[17]
  "Shelter[18]"
  "Heart Seeks Brain[19]"
  "A Scale Model of Gull Point[20]"
  "Pups[21]"
  "The Void Wife"[22]
  "Wildlife Watching[23]"

• Literary Hub - https://lithub.com/kate-folk-on-writing-a-contemporary-tribute-to-an-american-classic/

  Kate Folk on Writing a Contemporary Tribute to an American Classic
  Jane Ciabattari Talks to the Author of "Sky Daddy"
  By Jane Ciabattari
  April 8, 2025
  A first novel with a combination of heavyweight ambition, wry wit, and pathos, peppered with hilarious moments, Kate Folk’s Sky Daddy draws inspiration from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. Her epigram is a fitting lead-up to the novel:

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  “All men live enveloped in whale-lines.
  –Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

  Planes are the whales of the sky.
  –Linda”

  I asked the author why she paired a line from Melville’s classic with a comment from Linda, the narrator of Sky Daddy, and how Sky Daddy connects with Moby-Dick.

  “When I began this project, I struggled to find the right voice and tone,” she explained.

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  My initial attempts felt overwrought and lacking in mystery. About six months into drafting, I happened to begin re-reading Moby-Dick, and was immediately charmed by the voice of Ishmael—its buoyancy and playfulness offset by passages of great profundity and lyricism. I also found thematic connections, in a way that began to feel almost spooky. Linda’s ‘white whale’ is the plane that almost ‘chose her’ when she was thirteen.

  Whales and planes both contain oil, and are representations of humankind’s drive to dominate the natural world—a sort of death drive at the civilizational level. I wanted Linda to embody both Ishmael and Captain Ahab, increasingly consumed by her monomaniacal pursuit. I have heard Moby-Dick described as a vessel that allows Melville to lavish attention on whales. I wanted Sky Daddy to do the same for planes. ‘To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme,’ Melville writes. I felt that planes were certainly mighty enough.

  *

  Jane Ciabattari: How did you come up with the idea of a woman who develops an erotic attachment to planes? No spoilers here. You tell us about Linda’s romantic goal in the first paragraph, when she describes her “dream of marriage to a plane—what others vulgarly refer to as a ‘plane crash.’ I believed this was my destiny: for a plane to recognize me as his soulmate midflight and, overcome with passion, relinquish his grip on the sky, hurtling us to earth in a carnage that would meld our souls for eternity.”

  I’ve always found planes to be charming and animal-like. I’ve been awed by their sheer power and size, their ability to traverse vast distances.
  Kate Folk: I had seen documentaries about people who are attracted to objects, and conduct full-on relationships and even marriages with those objects. I thought it was a fascinating phenomenon, one that got me thinking about the nature of desire. I have been pondering whether desire is always one-sided, in a way, and if that is the source of its painful pleasure. When I was younger, I’d have crushes on people who didn’t know I existed, and I had no hope of them reciprocating my interest—in fact, that would have sort of ruined it. Is this really so different from having romantic feelings for a literal object?

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  Then, a friend sent me a link to a YouTube video, wherein a famous aviation disaster was recreated using some kind of flight simulation software. The processes of the crash were transcribed in eerie, stilted text on the screen. The interior of the plane was empty of people, the controls moving as if by an unseen hand. This uncanny spectacle invited me to imagine planes as sentient objects. I’ve always found planes to be charming and animal-like. I’ve been awed by their sheer power and size, their ability to traverse vast distances, and the way that boarding a flight is an act of surrender. It didn’t seem like a stretch that someone might be attracted to planes.

  JC: What sort of research was involved in writing about Linda’s plane spotting with her dad, her favorite planes, the airports (SFO, Dallas), the interiors?

  KF: I wrote the first draft of the novel during the pandemic shutdown. I think that there is some of my longing for flying, as a symbol of the old status quo, embedded in the novel. I mostly did research online, especially with figuring out what a particular plane’s weekly flight schedule might look like. Later on, I did the full Linda routine of taking the bus to the BART to the AirTrain to SFO. It felt subversive to be in the airport without having a flight booked, like I existed in a different dimension from the people around me. They rushed about, burdened with suitcases, with harried looks on their faces, while I wandered serenely, taking in the views.

  JC: You seem to have your own fascination with contrails: “There is an uncanniness to contrails, a sense of something both familiar and alien—a cloud that seems to be imparting a message, if only we could decode it,” as you write. Where does that come from?

  KF: I’ve always found contrails alluring, as I appreciate any opportunity to gawk at something in the sky. I began noticing them differently, though, while I was drafting the book. I have a flight tracking app, which I can use to view planes currently flying above me. When I see a plane above me, or hear the roar of engines, I’ll check what model it is and where it’s headed. In my neighborhood, there are often planes flying at around ten thousand feet, having just taken off from SFO. But there are other planes that have taken off from more distant airports, which I can observe only as a tiny dot at the head of the contrail. I still find aviation miraculous and just plain cool. I don’t want to lose that sense of wonder, and writing this book helped me cultivate it further.

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  JC: Linda’s first sexual experience with a plane is with N92823, when she is thirteen and on board with her parents and brother. When they hit turbulence she has her first surge of desire. Seventeen years later, living in San Francisco, she is still obsessed. And isolated, because she doesn’t want to divulge her proclivities. How did you develop this origin story and its ongoing effects on Linda’s life?

  KF: I thought that Linda should have a lost love, a “one that got away”—a singular love object with whom she experienced a transcendent moment. She’s continued to chase that high ever since. I wanted there to be some backstory to Linda’s obsession, but I didn’t want it to feel overdetermined, neatly ascribed to a traumatic incident, or reduced to simple metaphor. To me, she has this innate connection with planes, perhaps even tied in with her destiny, as she believes. The turbulent flight with her family merely activated what had been latent in her. It’s significant that she was with her entire family on that flight, and that it occurred shortly before her parents separated. For Linda, part of the fantasy of that flight is the nostalgia for her childhood prior to the rupture—a dark notion that it might have been preferable if they had all died together that day, preserved in an idealized form.

  JC: Linda works at Acuity, a tech company, as a content moderator (she’s the most efficient moderator in her vertical for the third consecutive month when we first meet her). On her breaks and after work, she pursues her obsession, streaming plane crashes, heading out to SFO to watch planes take off and land, taking regular flights on planes she finds attractive. Her obsession fuels her days. To what extent does her isolation and need for a passion mirror the experience of women today? Do the lingering aftereffects of the COVID lockdown influence this character? What else?

  KF: Many of us long for adventure, a peak experience that feels like truly living. Linda only feels alive when she’s flying. She regards it as her personal religion, with its attendant rituals and ceremonies. It might also be viewed as a kind of addiction, a way of disassociating from the reality of her life. I think people do this in all kinds of ways (with the internet, for example).

  I was thinking about stereotypical “masculine” vs “feminine” fiction while I was writing. If feminine fiction centers on the domestic sphere, masculine fiction involves a casting out into the unknown—Penelope tending the homestead while Odysseus goes off to war. I wanted the book to infuse that masculine sense of adventure into Linda’s story, which was another way in which Moby-Dick served as a source of inspiration.

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  JC: What research was involved in developing the atmosphere in Linda’s office and the details about her work in tech?

  KF: I read some fascinating articles about content moderation, as well as a few books—Behind the Screen by Sarah T. Roberts, and later on, the novel We Had to Remove This Post by Hannah Bervoets. I interviewed a friend who had worked as a moderator. But most of the atmospheric elements were drawn from office jobs I’ve held before, at nonprofits and as a copywriter for a startup. I wanted Acuity to be one of these Bay Area workplaces that is trying to mimic the perks of one of a major tech company, but on a shoestring budget—hence the modest supply of Costco snacks and deflated yoga ball.

  JC: Linda’s breakthrough from her isolation comes when her co-worker Karina, with whom she shares happy hour drinks and lunch at work, invites her to a quarterly Vision Board Brunch (VBB). Linda worries about how to present her vision of her dream to a group of “normal” women. This thread carries from your first page through the rest of the novel, presenting the fear of not being “normal” that haunts most of us today. Was that theme always part of your intention?

  KF: At the start of the book, Linda faces a dilemma. She understands it would be unseemly to broadcast her desire to die in a plane crash upon first meeting Karina’s friends; yet she does not want to mislead the universe about her true desire, as Karina has convinced her of the vision boards’ power.

  In reality, as in the book, one soon discovers that no one is normal and that feeling weird is a pretty universal human experience.
  I always found this to be an interesting tension—of Linda wanting to remain true to herself and what she believes is her destiny, versus trying to “fit in.” She’s self-aware enough to know how strange her desires would seem to others. She closely observes other people so she can mimic their behavior. I have certainly felt that way myself, as if I alone am different and everyone else is “normal.” In reality, as in the book, one soon discovers that no one is normal and that feeling weird is a pretty universal human experience.

  JC: Through the VBB group Linda develops a social life, and a sense of support; she also experiences rivalry, competition, and betrayal. And the dangers of keeping secrets. Friendship is not easy to write about. What helped you develop this theme?

  KF: I thought a lot about how Linda’s character should develop through the novel, and particularly how her friendship with Karina would exert pressure on Linda’s obsession with planes. The nature of an obsession, or an addiction, is that it shuts out other people, and makes a person essentially selfish. I felt that Linda’s essential nature should remain constant, but I wanted her character to evolve a bit to let in other people—if only as a way of biding her time while awaiting her destiny. I wanted the other women at the VBB to feel grounded, rather than like caricatures. They are a little basic, but I find them relatable, too. Their crafting of vision boards is mostly a way of setting personal goals and connecting with each other, versus the more hardcore version of manifestation, a la The Secret, that Karina and Linda buy into. Still, I think there is a strain of literalism, a desire to believe, running beneath anyone’s attempts at manifesting. It’s like how I feel about astrology—I know it can’t be real, and yet on some level, I completely believe in it.

  JC: Halfway through the novel, Linda has a meeting with Dave, a manager from the parent company. Gradually she and Dave connect, and begin taking flights together, drawing her into another taboo area, an office relationship. Was Dave always part of your plotline?

  KF: The story always led me in that direction—to a relatively powerful man affiliated with Linda’s company taking an interest in Linda, complicating her efforts to quarantine her plane obsession from her work life. Dave objectifies Linda the way she objectifies planes. He sees her as a quirky younger female coworker, a kind of manic pixie dream girl who gets horny on planes. Of course, Linda is also using Dave, viewing him as merely an “appendage to his American Express card.” It’s poignant how Linda and Dave develop a genuine friendship in spite of their very different motivations. They are two lonely people passing time together, as Linda observes.

  JC: What are you working on now/next?

  KF: I’m working on a novel in a completely different vein. It’s set in the early 1990s, in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and is written from the perspective of an insurance salesman named Arnold. It’s a suburban noir novel about the fantasies we project upon one another, and the dangers of nostalgia.

  __________________________________

  Sky Daddy by Kate Folk is available from Random House, a division of Penguin Random

• Conde Nast Traveler - https://www.cntraveler.com/story/kate-folk-sky-daddy

  Kate Folk's Debut Novel ‘Sky Daddy’ Is All About Getting Turned On by Taking Off
  In her newly released book, the author explores themes of self-acceptance through a woman's lust for airplanes.
  By Kat Chen
  April 8, 2025
  Image may contain Advertisement Poster Aircraft Transportation Vehicle Airplane and Publication
  Getty Images/Random Penguin House

  All products and listings featured on Condé Nast Traveler are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.

  Is there any travel experience so psychologically revealing as flight? Hopping on an airplane can induce us to cry seemingly out of nowhere, offer a rare glimpse into how we might fare without the Internet, and tap into our deepest anxieties. For Linda, the protagonist of Kate Folk’s offbeat debut novel, Sky Daddy, there’s no greater turn-on than flying. But forget any fantasies of Transatlantic glamour, clean-cut pilots, or cabins filtered through the haze of Newports—Linda lusts after the vehicles themselves and the idea that she might one day consummate her marriage to an airplane via a fatal crash. Yes, it’s a jarring premise—especially following recent headlines featuring plane crashes and aircraft malfunction—but it’s one Folk fleshes out with unexpected and radical compassion to the strangeness that exists in all of us.

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  As someone who developed a mild fear of flying recently, I began the novel with some trepidation, and—as glib as this may sound—finished it with renewed hope in our ability to accept one another, fetishes and all. I spoke with Folk about the darkly apt timing of her novel’s debut, her affinity for certain airports, and how traveling lures our inner weirdness into the light. Below is our conversation, edited and condensed for clarity.

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  Sky Daddy author Kate Folk photo by Andria Lo
  Sky Daddy is debuting following a string of aviation incidents—why write a story about air travel and specifically a story that leans into the anxiety around it?

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  Black Travel Alliance Founder Martinique Lewis | Traveler to Traveler

  I think the idea originally arose in part from my own anxiety around flying. I am myself somewhat of a fearful flyer, and so to me, boarding a plane represents this ultimate surrendering of control over my life, an act of faith. I'm not a religious person, but I feel like in the act of travel, I sort of become one. I think that's really interesting, and I wanted to explore these ideas around fate and just offering oneself to their ultimate purpose. To me it felt like air travel was a container to get at those notions because it’s something that can be so scary and yet is so miraculous. In spite of the recent incidents, which were so horrible, air travel is overall very safe. Yet there's no time in my life where I feel my own mortality more so than when I'm on a plane, and especially if there's turbulence.

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  How did you first conceive of Linda’s character?

  I originally had the idea to write a story about a woman who's sexually obsessed with airplanes, after seeing documentary clips of people who have like objective sexuality, like that woman who married the Eiffel Tower, or that woman who was attracted to the Berlin Wall. I just found that to be so fascinating. Planes were a natural fit, because to me, they look very human or animal in a way since they kind of have a face. And of course, they're kind of phallic in shape, and they're so powerful, and I could see how someone could find them handsome, or sexy, or all these things, so it didn't feel like a huge leap to me.

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  Then it took a while to figure out Linda's voice and what else there would be about her character. I was rereading Moby Dick when I had been working on the book for, maybe, six months, and there was something about the voice of Ishmael I found so playful. There were all these different kinds of registers within it—very lyrical passages that were also very funny, and I felt like Ishmael was just such a charming character. I was also inspired by Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata. I love that book, and I feel like it was another major inspiration for Linda's character as someone who has an unusual way of looking at the world. The character in that book, too, is very happy with her life, and she just has to sort of pretend in front of other people that she's going after these other things that are more socially accepted.

  Blue book with red writing and a picture of a plane in the sky
  'Sky Daddy' by Kate Folk
  $29 $26 (10% off)
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  Why are Chicago and O’Hare Airport—and the Bay Area—places of significance in the novel?

  I've lived in San Francisco since 2008 and so that's where I naturally set stories at this point, and I think SFO is also a beautiful airport. It would make sense that Linda would be drawn to live in a location that has an international hub kind of airport. Then, I think of O'Hare as a quintessential airport, because I grew up in Iowa City and Chicago was the big city that we would go to for holiday shopping and other big events. O’Hare was the formative airport for me—my family would fly out of it a lot—and I feel like it has cultural significance, too. Because it's in the center of the country, it made sense as a place for Linda to wind up. I'm trying to think if there are other airports… I did live in New York for about 5 years, and LaGuardia has a little bit of that draw for me as well. It’s funny how I have a certain fondness for some airports and aversion to others.

  I think the most commonly used descriptor for your work is “weird,” and Sky Daddy feels like an apology for the weird, in the sense that we can recognize it in all of us. Do you find that travel helps you crack the door into those strange parts of being human?

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  I think travel does expose people's true character. There's just so many moments of frustration and anger. You see all these videos that go viral of people getting into fights at the gate or on the plane, or whatever, because there’s such a feeling of helplessness: if your flight’s canceled, there's nothing you can do, and you might be stranded somewhere for days. It does seem a little unnatural to be able to get on a flight and then be on the other side of the world in like 15 hours, considering that we were never able to do that for most of [human history]. I do wonder if that is disorienting, almost on a cellular level for us. [Flying] is a very surreal experience that we see as normal at this point.

  There’s also a liminal experience in flying and being in airports. The idea of Linda flying somewhere, not caring at all about the destination, just wanting to take the flight, and then spending the night in the airport by choice, and flying right back seems so perverse. And it feeds back into that more oblique commentary on climate change, and how we're all fetishizing carbon consumption in a way. But Linda does it in a more literal way.

  People might not expect this book to have a focus on finding connection in unexpected places. How did that emerge as a theme?

  In earlier drafts, there was a harshness to the book that was developing from Linda being so isolated by her obsession, and there was nowhere, really, for the character to go from there, or for the story to go. I didn't want it to be a sarcastic or cynical book. It would’ve been the easy way to write it, but it also wouldn't be as interesting. I think about Linda as someone who is pretty self-aware and just happens to have this intense connection with planes and holds this belief in what her ultimate destiny is. But she has to live her normal life while she waits for her destiny to be manifested. And she still has the same needs for human companionship, and to feel like she belongs. Linda’s ultimate desire is to just be able to be herself, but she's written that off so early on as not being possible because she's aware that her desire is very strange. That’s the path of the book: How is Linda going to be her true self and be accepted?

  I finished the book with a renewed sense of humanity. How do you hope people come out of reading your book?

  I like hearing stuff like that because the premise sounds really zany and weird, and may seem like it could be one type of book. But then, when people actually read it, they find that it has more depth. I hate the term uplifting because it feels like everyone always says books are uplifting. But there is a more life affirming message in it that's also paired with this very dark sort of undercurrent of death. That, I think, is a universal human impulse. Oddly, in writing the book, it made me less afraid of flying. Diving more into the world of aviation, I saw how much goes into it, and how many people are so dedicated to it and how the system is really, really solid overall. Hopefully, that will continue.

  And so I hope people will feel more reinvigorated with a childlike excitement to fly, too, because that is something that's beaten out of us by the actual experience of commercial travel. And also that people will feel affirmed in their own weirdness if they feel like they have parts of themselves that are strange. It’s not only Linda, but all the characters in the book that have human weirdness, even they're better able to sublimate it, or channel it into more conventional desires. Everyone is weird: we all have weird things and weird thoughts and ideas about ourselves. Maybe people will find some companionship in Linda because she's definitely a woman who loves to travel.

• Electric Lit - https://electricliterature.com/finally-a-novel-that-understands-the-raw-sex-appeal-of-airplanes/

  Finally, a Novel That Understands the Raw Sex Appeal of Airplanes
  In "Sky Daddy," Kate Folk takes forbidden romance to new heights

  Apr 8, 2025
  Angela Hui
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  It wouldn’t be wrong to call Kate Folk’s debut novel Sky Daddy a marriage plot. The protagonist, Linda, has had numerous lovers, but she wants to settle down. She’s looking for a “fine gentleman” who’s sleek, strong, and ready to commit, and she already has her dream wedding planned: hurtling to her death in the “aluminum embrace” of her beloved.

  Linda is sexually attracted exclusively to aircraft. The lovers she seeks out every month are planes, and she yearns for a soulmate airplane to claim her as his bride in a crash that will “meld [their] souls for eternity.”

  Sky Daddy is a zany, charming, and unexpectedly poignant portrait of a woman who feels herself to be unassimilable to the world of normal people. Linda’s sexual obsession with planes is her sole source of pleasure, and it’s also her biggest secret. When her coworker starts inviting her to quarterly Vision Board Brunches, Linda wonders how to manifest her soulmate without revealing the true nature of her wish.

  I interviewed Kate Folk over Zoom at the end of January. We talked about Moby-Dick, manifestation, and wanting things that are bad for you.

  Angela Hui: Linda wants to die in a plane crash so that she can be united with her soulmate airplane forever. Several of the short stories in your collection Out There also feature characters whose desires are dangerous to themselves or others—they want to get shot by hunters or lobotomize their lovers. Why, in your writing, is love so dangerous?

  Kate Folk: I don’t know, it’s one of those things in my writing where I wouldn’t have realized it was a concern of mine until it started popping up across different stories. I think it’s a theme I’m drawn to because it encompasses so much more than just romantic obsession. It’s this impulse toward self-destruction and self-sabotage—feeling like something bad is going to happen and wanting to hasten the process and have it on our own terms, which is an interesting part of human nature. Maybe it’s been heightened by the internet and how so much of our lives are mediated by tech: there’s this desire to have something happen with the physical body in the real world.

  AH: You published a piece a few years ago about how your daily journaling practice helps you write fiction, and there’s an excerpt of a journal entry where you describe being on a turbulent flight and thinking you’re about to die. Did you draw on that experience while writing Sky Daddy?

  KF: Maybe, I’m trying to remember when I wrote that entry. It was probably around the same time I started working on the book in 2019. I think the line was something like, “I’m going to die drinking a Diet Coke I didn’t even want.” I was flying out of Iowa City after spending the holidays there. There was bad weather, and it was a really shaky little regional plane.

  I actually got the idea for the book when a friend texted me a link to a YouTube video from a channel called TheFlightChannel, which creates simulations of actual aviation incidents. The graphics are very bland, and it looks almost like a video game. And then there’s descriptions of what’s happening at every stage of the flight where something goes wrong. It just has a really eerie feeling to it. They don’t show people inside the plane; the cockpit’s empty. So I was imagining the plane as a sentient being of its own, and from there I started thinking about a character who has a connection with planes and falls in love with them.

  I’m afraid of flying, but I feel like writing the book has actually helped me to be less afraid.

  I’m afraid of flying, but I feel like writing the book has actually helped me to be less afraid. Linda would think turbulence is fun and know that it isn’t a threat to the plane. But it’s still really hard for me not to be terrified in the moment.

  AH: I’m curious about the theme of religion and spirituality in the book: the phrase “sky daddy” is a snarky way to refer to God, Catholicism comes up a few times, and Linda refers to her airplane fetish as her “personal religion, access point to the eternal sublime.” When you started writing this book, did you know that spirituality would play an important role?

  KF: No, that was something that became more prominent as I drafted it and the story took more shape. Linda has a kind of secular religion of feeling like she’s bound by fate and destiny. I thought it would be interesting to compliment that with other characters’ more traditional religious beliefs and how they’re all coming from the same place of wanting to connect to something bigger and wanting their lives to have meaning outside of themselves.

  I was also thinking about my own experiences flying and being afraid of flying. I’m not a religious person, but I will pray when I’m on a plane and there’s turbulence. There’s that joke about how there are no atheists on a turbulent plane. It seems like one of these moments where our lives really are in the power of something that we have no control over, so people turn to a higher power.

  The title came much later. For most of the time I was writing the book, I called it Moderation, which refers to Linda’s job as a content moderator as well as the overall theme of moderation—trying to moderate her impulses and that kind of thing. I always knew that was more of a working title. When my editor and I brainstormed ideas for titles, Sky Daddy was the most eye-catching one, and I like how it has that double meaning: the term for God, and also, obviously, planes are the sky daddies above us.

  The video player is currently playing an ad.
  AH: Spirituality also comes up in the Vision Board Brunches Linda attends in order to manifest the life (or death) she wants. What do you think makes manifestation appealing to Linda and to people in real life?

  I think it’s really empowering to have a clear vision of the things I want in life.

  KF: Linda takes the vision boards so literally, which is part of the humor of it – the idea that if she just pastes these images on the board, they’re literally going to come true. But I feel like there is great value in doing things like that. I’ve never actually made a vision board myself, but I’ve written things that I would like to do or that I would like to have happen. I think it’s really empowering to have a clear vision of the things I want in life.

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  For Linda, the appeal of the Vision Board Brunch also comes from being drawn into a community of women that she feels she was always ostracized from growing up, because she was a weird kid and was always fixated on the sky. Linda has to be on her best behavior and present herself as one of them, these women she sees as normal people with good jobs and relationships. That’s one of the tensions in the book: Linda wanting to reveal herself but knowing that she can’t fully do so, or being afraid that if she does reveal herself then other people won’t like her and her goals will somehow be hindered.

  AH: It’s interesting to see Rhonda Byrne-style manifestation in a work of fiction because it’s like the character is trying to become the author of the story they’re in. Is that how it felt when you were writing?

  KF: Yeah, that’s a really good point. Earlier drafts of the book didn’t have as much of a shape or sense of momentum, and I felt like the Vision Board Brunches were a nice way to take the story into another gear. There’s a sense that maybe the vision boards really do work, and Linda’s found a way to manipulate the strings of fate a bit – I definitely wanted it to be ambiguous. Whether or not things really are being manifested, Linda believes that they are, so there’s an internal engine to the story that’s driving things forward.

  AH: You’ve said that Sky Daddy is in “casual conversation” with Moby-Dick. Obviously, marrying a plane is Linda’s white whale. How else do you see the two books being in conversation?

  KF: Zadie Smith gave a lecture that was then published as an essay in the Believer, and she talks about using scaffolding devices when she’s drafting a novel. When I wrote the first draft of Sky Daddy, it was useful to have Moby-Dick as a scaffold.

  Writing a novel is just so difficult and daunting, especially at the beginning. I tried all these different ways to get into the story, but the voice was never quite right. Then I happened to start reading Moby-Dick in the fall of 2019, and right away I loved the voice in that book. The voice of Ishmael is so playful and full of life, and it combines all these different registers and literary allusions.

  Planes are the white whales of the sky.

  Once I started thinking of Sky Daddy in the mode of Moby-Dick, I saw all sorts of connections popping up, and it felt like I was really onto something. Planes are the white whales of the sky, and Ahab’s monomaniacal obsession with Moby-Dick makes him believe it’s his destiny to kill this whale even if it kills him in the process.

  There was also a similarity in that whales were pursued for their oil, and planes are full of oil in the form of jet fuel. I was thinking about flying as this carbon-intensive activity that’s bad for the environment and potentially will become taboo as climate change accelerates. Linda is pursuing this thing that she wants to kill her, literally, but also that is killing us all; we’re all addicted to lifestyles that are leading to catastrophe for humanity.

  At first, I tried really mapping the story onto Moby-Dick. I made an outline of every chapter in Moby-Dick, and then I tried to figure out equivalent events that could happen in my story. Eventually I let go of that, because it wasn’t leading to writing my own book, so I had to start over and write it my own way. But some of the DNA of that process of experimentation is still in there, especially in the voice.

  AH: Sky Daddy is your debut novel. Was it also the first novel you ever wrote?

  KF: No, it definitely wasn’t. I’d written three or four novels before this that were never published, one of them when I was in an MFA program and then a few others, including one that we took on submission but didn’t sell. I think all of that was important in figuring out how to write novels. It’s really difficult to know how to do it other than by doing it. That’s the advice that novelists always give, which is very annoying – it’s both insufficient and completely true.

  I spent a full year just generating. I wrote a thousand words a day in Linda’s voice, just to see where it went, and I had Linda do all kinds of stuff that didn’t make it into the final version. I felt like that helped me really explore the possibilities for the story.

  AH: Are there any darlings you had to kill that you would be willing to share?

  KF: Yeah, there were a lot of chapters directly inspired by chapters of Moby-Dick. In Moby-Dick, there’s a chapter called “Cetology,” and there’s all these chapters about whales that aren’t tied to the actual story – it’s just like, here’s some facts about whales. And they’re not even really true facts. That was a great source of inspiration, because Melville refers to the whales as gentlemen, and he’s very sassy about it, and he’s really opinionated about what counts as a whale and what doesn’t, and what the good whales are.

  I thought that was really funny, so I had a chapter similar to “Cetology” called “Aeronautics,” where Linda classifies interesting types of planes and has a lot of opinions about them, like she hates the Concorde and thinks it’s an abomination, and she thinks that some of the jumbo jets, like the 747 and the A380, are very snobby and aloof. Those are parts that ultimately didn’t fit in the story, and they were probably too literally inspired by Moby-Dick, because I didn’t want the book to be primarily an homage to Moby-Dick.

  AH: What other works inspired or influenced Sky Daddy?

  KF: I was partly inspired by Sayaka Murata’s novel Convenience Store Woman, which I love. The main character works at a convenience store, and everyone is asking her when she’s going to get a better job or get a boyfriend and get married, but she’s perfectly content working at the convenience store. I wanted Linda to be a similar type of character, where everyone else looks down on her lifestyle and her job as a content moderator, but she’s actually quite content with it – except, of course, that she wants her fate to be realized on a flight.

  Another inspiration was J. G. Ballard’s novel Crash and the Cronenberg film that was adapted from it, especially when I started thinking more about the plane crash angle. I was also thinking about the genre of “sad girl books”—Melissa Broder’s novel The Pisces was an inspiration as well. But Linda is a little different, because she’s not sad; she’s actually very glad to be pursuing this goal in her life, even though most people would say it’s a bad goal.

  AH: Tell me more about the idea of “sad girl books.” How do you see your work fitting or not fitting into that genre?

  KF: It’s a category you see on TikTok, along with “hot girl books” or whatever. I don’t really like the way those books are talked about. But I think about writers like Ottessa Moshfegh or Halle Butler – I love their books, and I’ll read anything they write. Those are potentially in that genre we’re talking about, books about women who are kind of dirtbags, which is a genre I really love, because I love unlikable female characters. A lot of the stories in Out There have a similar vibe, with women who are complicated, who aren’t necessarily girl boss types, who are maybe pursuing things that aren’t good for them. I can relate a lot to that type of character and find them really interesting.

  AH: One of the few things Linda does other than think about planes is work as a content moderator for a tech company. Why did you choose that job for her?

  KF: When I started writing the book, I was also writing a short story about content moderators because I had listened to an NPR segment and read some articles about it and found it so interesting. It’s this huge sector of the tech world that’s hidden, and it’s not illustrious like other tech jobs; a lot of it is outsourced to other countries and much more low-paying.

  Linda uses the internet to watch flight simulations and research famous incidents, and to keep track of her “lovers” with the flight tracking app on her phone, and I think the internet might also have pushed Linda into wanting this darker thing and desensitized her to images of death. So it’s made her the ideal candidate for that kind of job. Her character is part of a generation that’s grown up with the internet and has access to all types of disturbing content.

  AH: This book made me realize how much overlap there is between the sexual fetish and the objective correlative. Does a character’s fetish always reveal something about their psychological state? Is a kink ever just a kink, or is it always a symbol for something else?

  KF: I wanted it to be both, in a way. I didn’t want there to be some formative incident in Linda’s childhood that definitively explained why she’s into planes. I wanted it to be just sort of who she is. Also, I kind of get it—her kink, or whatever. I don’t share it, but I can see how planes have that raw power and sexiness, and they’re amazing machines. Once I started thinking from Linda’s point of view, it didn’t actually seem like that much of a stretch.

  At the same time, I definitely want there to be potential within the book for those connections to be made. There’s such a sense of power and freedom in a plane, because it can travel across the world, and it also has the power to kill people. It’s something that can be feared but also revered. Linda has been disempowered in her life in various ways, and the plane is a way for her to latch onto this very powerful symbol.

  AH: Did you do any research on obscure fetishes?

  KF: Yeah, that was another source of inspiration. I saw a documentary on Youtube years ago about people with objectum sexuality who are in relationships with objects. That was part of what inspired me to have Linda refer to planes with male pronouns and think of them as masculine, because one of the women in the documentary referred to her love object as “he” and thought it was really important not to say “it.”

  But I also didn’t want Linda to represent a sexuality or to be reduced to a diagnosis. I wanted her to be very much a singular character who isn’t meant to stand in for a real type of person in the world.

  AH: Right, and she wants to be singular. She doesn’t even want to know if other people are hot for planes, because she’s a “jealous lover.” She’s so alone in her obsession.

  KF: Yeah, that’s part of the romance of it. She doesn’t want to share it with anyone else, because it’s her private thing with the planes.

• The Racket - https://theracketsf.com/home/interview/laurencjohnson/katefolk

  Sky Daddy
  Kate Folk
  Random House
  An interview with Lauren C. Johnson
  In Kate Folk’s debut novel, Sky Daddy (Random House, 2025), a woman named Linda yearns for marriage—with an airplane. In particular, a 737-800 with tail number N92823. Linda's single-minded desire propels her odyssey. By day, she works what most would consider a grueling job as an online content moderator to save up for monthly roundtrip flights from San Francisco International Airport. Will Linda tie the knot in a ceremony that, in her words, others vulgarly refer to as a plane crash?

  Another author might have turned Linda’s romantic and sexual attraction to airplanes into a running joke—and don’t get me wrong, there are many laugh-out-loud moments throughout Sky Daddy— but Folk wrote Linda with such depth that she becomes relatable in her complexities. After all, who among us has not longed to be accepted for who we truly are while, at the same time, fearing being seen? Sky Daddy also speaks to the wonder and horror inherent in commercial flying. Folk describes incidents like clear air turbulence, sudden altitude losses, and crashes in technical detail while writing the language of aviation so poetically that the most travel-weary reader will stop to marvel at the fact that we humans have taught ourselves to fly.

  I met Folk at Royal Grounds Coffee in the Inner Richmond to talk about Sky Daddy. Folk shared how she developed Linda’s voice, used yearning to drive the plot, wrote to subvert gendered narratives, and so much more. Here are the best parts of our conversation, edited for clarity and brevity.

  Lauren C. Johnson: I was impressed with your knowledge of airplanes. I think you nailed the language of aviation in a way that felt deliberate and seamlessly woven into the narrative, from “ailerons” to “takeoff roll.” Did you know much about airplanes before you wrote Sky Daddy? If not, what was that learning process like?

  Kate Folk: I definitely had to learn, though I've always been interested in planes. When I started writing Sky Daddy, I began paying attention to the flight safety cards and realized I could learn a lot about any particular plane I was on—both on the card and online. I didn't know how accessible all that information was. It was fun to track a specific plane, see its schedule, and realize that planes are constantly flying above us.

  But initially, I became fascinated with planes when a friend texted me a link to a YouTube video on the Flight Channel, which recreates famous airplane incidents. The videos are made with software that creates a basic animation of inside the plane. It's eerie because there are no pilots inside the cockpit. There's no people in the cabin, and the controls just move on their own as the narrator explains what’s happening on the technical level, moment-by-moment. The grammar is a little off on the transcribed text, so it all feels uncanny. That got me thinking about planes as almost sentient, mystical beings.

  Then I started thinking about a woman who's in love with a plane. I had seen a documentary about people with objectum sexuality— which I thought was fascinating—and I thought a plane would be a good object to fall in love with because they're so powerful and they have a face. They look kind of like animals.

  Once I started writing the book, I saw planes in a whole new way. So now I have my Flightradar24 app, and whenever I see an airplane flying above, I check the app to see where it's going and what type of plane it is.

  LCJ: To piggyback on that question, can you share more about your worldbuilding process while you wrote this novel? I know we often associate the term “worldbuilding” with speculative fiction, but that feels like an appropriate word to use here because aviation and tech are their own ecosystems with specific languages/jargon.

  KF: The novel is really a character study of someone who's so obsessed with planes that they inform how she sees the world. For example, when Linda meets a new man, she compares him to a model of an airplane. She meets one man who doesn't resemble any plane, and that's the ultimate insult. He's so beneath her that he doesn't even look like a plane. I wanted to seed in details like that but not include too many because it could overwhelm the story if I was too heavy-handed. But that was a fun part of the worldbuilding.

  As for Linda's job as a content moderator, I haven't worked that particular job, but I've worked in offices, and workplace relationships are always interesting. One of the things we've lost through remote work is forming friendships with people we would see all the time, though they weren’t people we might normally ever mingle with.

  At one point, I had a copywriting job for a startup that was similar in some ways to Acuity, though it wasn't the same type of work. I thought it would be funny to imagine a tech company pretending it's a place like Google with all the great perks, but it isn't actually. They just have the Costco snacks once a quarter, and a really shitty wellness room they let people take breaks in.

  I love workplace novels, too. I wanted Linda to have a job that everyone else would think is horrible but that she enjoys and feels good at. It's the first time in her life that her unusual skill set has been used well. I also wanted her to have a job that was separate from planes and the airport so that she could have this default position from which she could long for the planes.

  In earlier drafts, she was a flight attendant and married to a pilot. That felt like too much. There has to be a separation between Linda and the plane so that she can yearn for the plane and fulfill her longing when she flies once a month.

  LCJ: That makes sense as a way to drive the plot forward—to create the space for yearning.

  KF: And the financial distance. Linda doesn't have much money, so she really has to save up for that one flight a month. That’s what she's living for, that one round-trip flight. Some of the tension would be reduced if she had a lot of money.

  LCJ: I’m in awe of flight and also afraid of it. Did the tension between fear and awe propel the story for you?

  KF: Definitely. There's something about planes that's dangerous. Something feels unnatural about getting on a plane and being that high in the sky, going that fast. The fact is that, for the most part, flying is very safe, but it doesn't seem like it should be. I feel that, as animals, we haven't quite evolved to understand what's happening or to accept that flying is safe because it doesn't feel like something we should be able to do.

  So, for me, fear was part of it and the act of surrender that boarding a plane entails. When the flight door is closed, everything is out of my hands. Nothing I do in regular life has the same intensity as submitting to a force greater than myself. And that experience is contrasted with the banality of commercial air travel these days and how it's very uncomfortable and cramped and unpleasant. But at the same time, it's this majestic experience of being miles above the earth.

  LCJ: I feel that way about flying, too. I always film the takeoff roll on my phone if I have a window seat. There's something about seeing the plane take off through my phone screen that calms me.

  KF: Me too. ​I love having the window seat. Sometimes I'll take an aisle seat just so I can get to the bathroom easier if it's a longer flight, but if that wasn't an issue, I would always have a window seat. I don’t understand people who buy a window seat just to keep the shade down.

  LCJ: Let’s talk about Linda. What was your process for developing her voice as the first-person narrator?

  KF: Sky Daddy was always in first person, even from the earliest draft, but it was difficult to get the voice right. Linda’s character could have easily become more nihilistic and cynical, and that didn't really feel right for a character who has this thing about her that she knows is strange but that she doesn't doubt for a second. That ties into the Moby-Dick influence.

  I read an abridged children's version of Moby-Dick when I was a kid, and it made a deep impression on me because I remember a detail early in the book where Ishmael is talking about this memory as a kid of being punished for trying to crawl up a chimney. His mom sends him to bed early; it's the middle of the day, and he has to be in bed as if he's sick. He falls into this half sleep, then wakes up and feels a hand holding his above the covers. That made such a deep impression on me, and even now, I never keep my hand outside the covers.

  But it wasn’t until 2019 that I read the unabridged version of Moby-Dick. Ishmael’s voice was so buoyant, playful, and full of life and humor, which balances the heaviness of some of the themes of fate and Ahab's monomania in pursuing Moby-Dick, as well as all the religious themes and extremely detailed whale stuff. The book is also a vehicle for Melville to talk about whales in all these different ways, how amazing they are, and how interesting whaling is. I wanted my book to be similar, except about planes—an anatomy of planes and aviation.

  Finding that inspiration gave me a new way into the story. I drafted using Moby-Dick as a scaffold a bit too explicitly for a while. But it was useful, especially to generate Linda's voice. ​​

  Another inspiration was Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, which is such a funny, charming book. The narrator is deeply committed to the convenience store where she works. It takes place in Japan, in a culturally conservative milieu where the people around her are getting married and having kids and everyone's telling her, "Don't you want more from life? Are you going to keep working at the convenience store forever?" The narrator feels all this pressure even though she's perfectly happy with her life the way it is and loves the convenience store. The author even has an essay at the end of that book that's basically about someone being sexually obsessed with a convenience store.

  LCJ: On that note, Linda’s intense fixation with airplanes is consistent throughout the novel and never abates—from constantly checking Flight Aware like it’s a dating app to fantasizing about N92823 during masturbation and sex. As you were writing, did you have a process for knowing when to push into the absurd and when to hold back?

  KF: I spent a full year generating in Linda's voice. I wrote a lot of tangents and passages similar to chapters in Moby-Dick where Ishmael talks about different types of whales. I had a chapter where Linda talked about her opinions on different types of planes, but that ended up on the cutting-room floor.

  I had drafted maybe 150 pages that I workshopped during my time in the Stegner program. People liked it but the professor said that those pages felt very episodic, like a picaresque novel that’s not building an arc or leading up to a climax. Each chapter was its own thing. That’s a fine way to write a novel, but it's not conventional in terms of a story that's taking us along a continuous track. So I had to think about the plot and the build. What would be the fullest expression of the premise? An early reader pointed out that I should let Linda fly more because that's her thing. That's the promise of the book.

  I had to figure out a way to keep Linda's fixation on flying, the planes, and the fate angle focused rather than going into all these tangents about her job and other things that were possible in the story.

  LCJ: I’ve seen some publications describe Sky Daddy as boundary-pushing. That got me thinking about how, under patriarchy, women’s desires are often scrutinized—even the most banal of desires. So, why not lean in all the way and write a novel about a woman who desires airplanes? From this lens, Sky Daddy is a defiant novel. Were the politics of women’s sexuality and desires on your mind as you wrote?

  KF: There's a uniqueness to the experience of being a woman who has written a book with anything controversial. People will automatically assume that I'm writing about myself and that I'm saying people should fetishize planes. But that's not what writing a novel is about to me.

  I was thinking about patriarchy and gender dynamics and how all the characters in Sky Daddy the book are just as weird as Linda but in different ways. Dave is obsessed with his ex-wife and her new boyfriend, and Karina is obsessed with her fiancé and trying to manipulate him to marry her using vision boards. There's this fetishization of marriage for someone like Karina, but it just happens to be a socially acceptable type of fixation. However, all the characters objectify each other in various ways. Linda's objectification of planes is more literal, but it's the same psychological mechanism of yearning for something that won't love you.

  In terms of the gendered narratives, I was thinking about the idea of “men's fiction” versus “women's fiction” and how readers think of women's fiction as domestic. Odysseus goes off to war while Penelope stays home and tends to the domestic sphere. I wanted Linda to get to go on her voyage, in the vein of a “masculine” adventure story.

  LCJ: I was struck by how Linda repeatedly references her father's death throughout the novel, despite it having occurred years earlier. This portrayal of grief feels authentic in capturing grief's lingering presence in our lives. Could you share more about grief's role in Sky Daddy and how it shapes Linda's character and relationships?

  KF: I wanted Linda's relationship with her father to be her most important relationship. His loss was devastating. But I also wanted to make sure that her plane fetish wasn't a response to that—it existed before. No matter what, she would be this way, not because of an experience.

  Linda feels that her dad is the one person who would have understood her if she had dared to explain herself to him, but she never did. So she regrets not having done that. There is a spirituality in how Linda's personal religion is flying as well as her belief that she’s destined to die in a plane crash. Flying is a way to commune with her dad. And not just with her dad but with all the forces we can’t control.

  LCJ: Talk to me about Moby-Dick! What was your experience writing a novel in conversation with this classic?

  KF: As I read Moby-Dick, I would come upon little details that resonated with Sky Daddy. It did feel like having a conversation across time with Melville. Planes are the whales of the sky, in part because aviation and whaling both revolve around oil.

  Whaling is an industry that represents humankind's domination over the natural world. People kill these majestic beings to make money from their oil, and then there’s the grandeur and peril of the ocean. In Moby-Dick, it’s a foolish game for these men to be tangling with a force like the whale and the ocean itself; they're doomed to be destroyed by it. So there was a resonance for me there with flying. Today, flying is a relatively affordable means of transportation, but it doesn't seem like it’s going to be that way forever. Oil is a finite resource.

  Initially, I was trying to remake Moby-Dick about planes, but you can't do that because we're living in a different time. So I had to make my own modern version and let the scaffolding fall away. There are still bits of an older voice in there, but for the most part, I modernized this story and took away some of Linda's more highfalutin vocabulary and syntax from previous drafts.

  LCJ: Linda’s belief that airplanes have a unique kind of sentience reminds me of the short story, “Moist House” in your collection, Out There. In which ways is Sky Daddy in conversation with Out There?

  KF: One of the critiques I’ve seen of Out There is that the stories are about women chasing after awful men. I see that there is a lot of that in Out There, and maybe those stories reflected what fascinated me at the time. I think I’ve outgrown that a bit now that I'm older, so Sky Daddy moves in the opposite direction. This novel is about a woman who doesn't want anything to do with men—or people, really. Well, she does, but she's fixated on something completely different. That felt fun to me, in an inside-joke-with-myself way.

  It’s true that in Out There, especially in the blot stories, a woman falls in love with what she thinks is a man but is actually advanced AI. But I've always been fixated on the idea of objects having sentience and souls. Even the first stories I wrote as a kid were all about my stuffed rabbit, Peter, which I'm sure is very common, considering The Velveteen Rabbit.

  LCJ: That story still makes me cry.

  KF: It's probably the saddest story I’ve ever read. And I've always carried that with me, this belief that love makes you real.

Folk, Kate SKY DADDY Random House (Fiction None) $29.00 4, 8 ISBN: 9780593231494

A surreal tale of one woman's epic search for a love that can never be returned.

When Linda isn't working as a content moderator at the tech company Acuity or passing time in the windowless bedroom she rents from a local family, she travels the skies in her beloved airplanes. Linda doesn't simply love planes--she'sin love with them, referring to each "fine gentleman" fondly by his tail number and admiring not only the planes' "slender ankles" and "intelligent windscreen[s]" but also their individual personalities. Linda flies both to experience sexual pleasure and to search for what she sees as her ultimate fulfillment: "for a plane to recognize me as his soulmate mid-flight and, overcome with passion hurtl[e] us to earth" in a crash. Despite her commitment to her goal, Linda is keenly aware that she's not normal, and works to shield her deepest desires from the people around her. Her life is an isolated one until she's befriended by Karina Carvalho, a colleague at Acuity. As Linda's dream of communion with an airplane remains elusive, she finds herself increasingly wrapped up in her friendship with Karina and experimenting with relationships with human men. Soon, the pressure of maintaining her lives in the air and on the ground will become too difficult, forcing her to choose which she values most. Folk--following up her memorably weird and innovative story collection,Out There (2022)--displays a masterful command over Linda's mindset and thought processes in her first-person narration. Though Linda is deeply deluded, she's self-aware about the unusual nature of her emotions without ever questioning them. And her life is otherwise mundane, characterized by relatable stresses about work, friendship, and the struggle to fit in. This strange combination of tones is often hilarious, but never at Linda's expense.

An utterly confident and endearing portrait of a woman unlike anyone readers have met before.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Folk, Kate: SKY DADDY." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A827101055/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=af16ae4a. Accessed 22 Aug. 2025.

Sky Daddy

Kate Folk. Random House, $29 (368p)

ISBN 978-0-593-23149-4

FUSING MOBY-DICK and J.G. Ballard's Crash, this blistering debut novel from Folk (Out There, a story collection) traces a woman's sexual and mortal obsession with airplanes. "Call me Linda," begins the narrator, who rides the AirTrain around San Francisco's airport to lust after fuselage and marvel at wingspans when she's not busy toiling as a content moderator for a social media platform. Her job entails training the AI that will eventually replace her, but she's not worried about the future, so long as she can fulfill her dream of "marriage" to a plane (she hopes to consummate her passion with a "big boy" passenger jet in a fiery crash, "a carnage that would meld our souls for eternity"). Recognizing that her plan might take time, given the low probability of plane crashes and her limited funds for air travel, she tries dating pilots, the next best thing, and her spirits briefly soar after she finds pilotdate.net.

Unfortunately, her only matches are bots and imposters, causing her to swear off men in favor of a plane's "aluminum embrace." Still, while on a flight to Houston, she's turned on enough by the jet's "girthy central spine" to fool around with her ketamine-addled colleague Dave, and their actions have surprising and farcical consequences. The allure of an inanimate object has seldom been so touchingly rendered than in Folk's wry, tender, and sweetly odd narrative. It's an unforgettable ode to the pursuit of desire. Agent: Emma Patterson, Brandt & Hochman Assoc. (Apr.)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Sky Daddy." Publishers Weekly, vol. 272, no. 6, 10 Feb. 2025, p. 32. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A828300532/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=47399697. Accessed 22 Aug. 2025.