Finally, a Novel That Understands the Raw Sex Appeal of Airplanes

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. 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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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