If we told our forebears that we could soar in the sky nearly seven miles above the ground, they would stare at us agog. But now air travel is one big grumble: it’s degrading, everyone is ill-mannered and you used to get free peanuts in this country, but now the peanuts are not free. Air travel, like everything else, is about the politics of resentment. The skies are feeling a lot less friendly, and that’s before you get to a year in which Americans have experienced profound tragedy in the air, as well as significant cuts to an already strained Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).
In this turbulent time for flying lands Sky Daddy, the unusual debut novel by Kate Folk, a San Francisco author and screenwriter whose short story collection Out There was released in 2022. Sky Daddy is narrated by a woman called Linda who, like many of us, lives her life in dogged pursuit of love. She just wants that love to come from a commercial airplane in free fall. “I believed this was my destiny,” Linda tells us, “for a plane to recognize me as his soulmate mid-flight and, overcome with passion, relinquish his grip on the sky, hurtling us to earth in a carnage that would meld our souls for eternity.”
Yes, Linda is kind of the female protagonist for whom the descriptor “quirky” is not quite strong enough. She gets off on simulations of aviation accidents. She calls airport terminals her own “personal red-light districts”. Her style of objectifying airplanes is impressive: she admires their “testicular engines” and ogles at a “naughty landing gear shot”. The Boeing 737 is the “sky’s narrow-bodied workhorse”, the Airbus A320 has the “handsomest face of any commercial airliner”.
And then there is the retired McDonnell Douglas DC-9, an airplane that she says “flaunts a ‘bad-boy’ image” given its historically spotty safety record. Linda spends as much time as her paltry salary affords her up in the sky. “Like dating,” she tells us, “death by plane crash is a numbers game.”
Sky Daddy is a very strange and very funny book. But it does not exist as mere provocative gag, or mean-spirited attempt to belittle one woman’s absurd romantic delusions. Linda defies diagnosis: her aims are more spiritual than they are symptomatic. “She’s a singular character,” says Folk. “I kind of imagine her as a real person, it’s hard for me to accept that [she’s] just something I’ve made up.”
When Folk was a child growing up in landlocked Iowa, she read a version of Moby-Dick that was modified for children. What stood out to her most was the description of Ishmael’s experience of waking up as a child and feeling a ghostly presence hold his hand. “A supernatural hand seemed placed in mine,” writes Melville, “and for days and weeks and months afterwards I lost myself in confounding attempts to explain the mystery.” It had a lasting effect on Folk. “I still never sleep with my hand outside the covers,” says Folk. “Because I’m afraid of that happening and I don’t want to invite it.”
Later, when she was drafting a novel about a woman sexually obsessed with airplanes, she returned to Melville’s classic. “I saw Linda as a mixture of Ishmael and Ahab,” says Folk, adding that she felt both her work and Melville’s were about humans trying to dominate the natural world. “Both planes and whales involve oil.” She loved the many different registers of Melville’s novel, its playfulness and its enthusiastic anthropomorphizing of whales. “It’s very silly a lot of the time,” says Folk. “Calling them gentlemen and fellows.”
Linda too has a strict understanding of how things in her fantasy world are sexed and gendered: “I allowed people to assume I was heterosexual,” she explains, “and I suppose I was, as all planes are male in spirit, just as all boats are female, and helicopters possess the souls of mischievous children.”
Unlike Ishmael and Ahab however, Linda is a creature of the internet. “That’s how she’s fueled her obsession,” Folk says. “It’s how she researches her plane lovers and keeps tabs on them, and looks at past plane incidents.” Linda’s life revolves around planes, but her passion is sustained by her work as a content moderator in the Hate & Harassment sector of a tech company, where she and her colleagues make near minimum wage scrubbing the internet of its various maladies: violent images, crude and predatory pornography, onslaughts of verbal threats and assaults. Their office amenities are a yoga ball in a so-called wellness room and monthly pallets of Rockstar lemonade. Sky Daddy is a workplace novel as much as it is an epic romp. “It’s this unseen pool of workers who are doing this like terrible labor that supports our use of the internet,” explains Folk. “They’re absorbing the trauma for our sakes.”
The fact that Kate Folk dreamt up and drafted this book years before the recent spate of high-profile plane crashes filled the news, and before the new administration fired several hundred workers at the FAA, is a coincidence. But it’s also not. Governments have a special way of corrupting and polluting those things that literally keep us afloat: social services, environmental protections, any semblance of a humane healthcare system. There is no premium on the dignity of human life in the US. To be an American is to believe fundamentally in the power of one’s destiny.
But Sky Daddy reminds us that air travel in a way is the opposite of the agentic American dream. To get on a plane is to submit to a fate you have no control over. “Even in better times when there weren’t these incidents … it is such an act of surrender,” explains Folk. “When I get on a plane, I really am not in control of what happens. I have to just put my faith in the machine and also in the pilots and air traffic control and everyone working to make sure the flight gets to where it’s going safely.”
Then there is the existential question of the climate crisis, and how it threatens to upend any notion of the future we might have previously conceived. The day the sky in San Francisco turned a shocking orange due to wildfire smoke haunts Folk’s fiction. The distinction between literary fiction and sci-fi or genre fiction became less meaningful to her. “Basically my entire life is just this sense of hurtling toward a catastrophe,” she says, referring to the climate crisis.
Linda’s obsession with flying is part of that. Her death drive, her lust for this carbon-intensive mode travel, is inevitable ending; it’s not hard to feel like to some degree we are all Linda, hurtling towards a fiery conclusion. “There is no greater intimacy than to be fellow passengers on a doomed flight,” Linda tells us. She is an accelerationist. She dreams of self-annihilation, sure. But she also dreams of being chosen. She hopes her life amounts to something more than eating work-grade string cheese and deleting lewd comments on a video of a busty kindergarten teacher reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
During our conversation, I got the sense that Folk had a fond appreciation for her fictional character Linda, which I shared. Linda is a little freak for sure, but she’s endearing to me, and somewhat pure (I like how she calls joints “cannabis cigars”.)
Maybe I could learn something from her. It just so happened that the week Folk and I were talking, both of us were taking flights. I asked her if she wanted to text me when she was taking off, to see what she noticed about the miracle of flight to which I had maybe been deadened and desensitized. I told her I would do the same.
She texted me in the middle of the day that she was boarding an infamous Boeing 737 Max, the model that made headlines for its previous history of nosedives. Linda would love that, I thought.
“We’re turning left,” Folk wrote. “A plane is like a bird”, she added, “clumsy and slow on the ground.” Then she told me the engines were firing up and changing tenor. What was the inadvertent rhythm of our conversation reminding me of? I thought. And then with a little pang of shame, I realized it had the faint whiff of sexting.
Two days later I was crawling through that yonic jet bridge, feeling dispirited. Historically I have been afraid of flying or at least dreaded it. I was on Linda’s beloved 737-800/900 (“a long boy”, Kate texted me when I told her), and it looked dingy, worn-in and world weary.
But then we began to move, the wings wobbling as we inched forwards on the tarmac, a polite row of seemingly animate planes lining up behind us. And then we lifted off into the sky. I could see all of Manhattan and Brooklyn before me: the wide sandy beaches of the Rockaways where I swim every summer, the dark patch of cemetery by my apartment, the skyscrapers in the distance. I held their gaze until suddenly everything was vaporous and white, occluded by cloud. I had no romantic attachments to the plane, but I could feel the eternal romance of it, Like maybe Linda was holding my hand as we flew closer to the sun and left the whole world behind.
