I thought I was being original by asking Kate Folk, the San Francisco-based author of the critically acclaimed novel “Sky Daddy,” to meet me in the Berman Reflection Room to watch passing planes at San Francisco International Airport. (The book, if you’re not aware, is about a woman’s sexual fixation on planes and her belief that, if she dies in a crash, the aircraft has chosen her to be its wife.) She politely informed me that she’s already been trotted out to the SkyTerrace by KQED, and along the Burlingame waterfront where the Elephant Bar once was — one of the main character’s favorite haunts — by the San Francisco Chronicle.
Nevertheless, the Iowa-born writer, who just moved to Glen Park after a long stint living in the Richmond, was down to join me in the quiet enclave just across from the BART entrance for an interview.
Folk’s book, which has been out for exactly one year and just had its paperback release through Penguin Random House, has become something of a literary sensation. The story follows Linda, a 30-year-old loner living in a windowless cube on the foggy fringes of the Sunset. She makes $20 an hour as a content moderator at a YouTube-adjacent tech company in Daly City, a job she dutifully shows up for, even though she is training its artificial intelligence to eventually replace her. No matter: The majority of her earnings go toward her monthly trip to SFO to spend a wild night out with a handsome stranger she seeks to be eternally bonded with — one with sleek wings, a beefy tail and tempting turbulence.
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The possibility of new friendship blossoms when Linda’s coworker, Karina, invites her to a quarterly Vision Board Brunch with her other pals. The idea thrills Linda, who is keen on manifesting her destiny but knows she must keep her true passions at bay to avoid blowing her cover among the rest of the group. When the opportunity arises to take more flights than ever, speeding up her fate, Linda realizes she must choose between her worlds, leading to absurd, hilarious and surprisingly tender results.
Planes as provocative
Despite its surreal premise, “Sky Daddy” has seen an outpouring of breathless BookTok reviews and has appeared on several recommended reading lists, ranging from Oprah Daily to Publishers Weekly. It was selected as a finalist for the California Book Award and named by Green Apple Books as its coveted book of the year for 2025 (which is how I came across it after numerous friends and colleagues told me that they couldn’t put it down.)
Passenger aircraft is parked at the gate on the tarmac at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco.
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“This is the craziest, funniest book I’ve read in a while,” author Gary Shteyngart wrote in his review that appears on the back of the hardcover. “… Get your boarding pass out and get ready for some turbulence. Sky Daddy is insane.”
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Folk and I wandered into the pre-security room typically intended for prayer and meditation, though I previously reported on a Fear of Flying workshop held there. Worried about disrupting the quiet — and a couple of sleeping airline employees — we opted instead for a stretch of seating along a far wall next to the bathroom, where the din of the airport was punctuated by the occasional roar of a hand dryer. Through the window, we glimpsed a lumbering Avianca Airbus with the tail number N967AV. “Looks like a big boy,” Folk deadpanned. A passenger crouched next to us, clearly trying to reduce the weight of their checked bag by tossing a bunch of clothes into their carry-on, zipping and unzipping as we considered the eroticism of planes.
“I think it’s easy to see, honestly,” Folk said. “They’re such majestic machines.”
When she started writing the book in 2019, Folk created an Instagram account, @skydaddylinda, which follows only airlines and airplane manufacturers, as well as fellow plane spotters and other aviation obsessives. She discovered a common through line in the posts, frequently captured at golden hour using amusingly provocative angles.
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“The pictures they post of planes, they really look like thirst traps a lot of the time,” she said, laughing. “And so I’m thinking a lot of people feel this way. They’re really impressive objects, and then you’re placing your life in their hands, or their wings, or whatever. So it didn’t feel like a stretch.”
It worked for her editor, to whom she pitched the book as something of a cross between J.G. Ballard’s “Crash,” the story of fetishists who become aroused by staging car accidents, which was later adapted into the 1996 David Cronenberg movie of the same name, and Sayaka Murata’s 2016 novel “Convenience Store Woman,” whose main character finds peace in her mundane job while facing pressure from her family to marry and find a meaningful career.
“Yeah, I mean, I think that it was just ‘a woman who’s sexually obsessed with airplanes,’” Folk said of the initial logline.
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Author Kate Folk is pictured at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco on March 25, 2026.
Charles Russo/SFGATE
SF from a different angle
The author’s own relationship with flying is a complicated one, shaped by both fear and fascination. The story first took flight, however, when a friend texted her a link to a video from a strange YouTube channel. It was focused on re-creating flight disasters, using eerily uncanny animation to explain what was happening at every stage. No people were present in the videos, and the controls of each plane moved as if they were flying on their own, carrying their passengers to their deaths.
“That really creeped me out and made me think, ‘What if a plane is alive and it has, you know, autonomy in some way?’” Folk said. “I imagined a character that thought along those lines, and then it kind of went from there.”
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Now a savvy plane spotter with a flight-tracking app on her phone to identify each fine gentleman soaring above her, Folk initially didn’t know much about planes, aside from what she described as a “perverse fascination” with famous crashes — particularly those involving everyone on board passing out while the plane kept going on its own. She referenced the 2014 Malaysia Airlines flight MH370, which disappeared on its voyage from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, leaving all 227 passengers and 12 crew members presumed dead.
“I was just riveted,” Folk said. “No one knew where this plane went, and it’s still this mystery.”
FILE: An Alaska Airlines plane lands as a Southwest Airlines plane taxis to takeoff at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco.
Smith Collection/Gado via Getty Images
She had imagined she would try a writing residency at SFO, but after one day of mimicking Linda’s commute, taking the bus to BART and then heading to the airport, she was so tired that she just went home. Instead, her research shifted online, partly by necessity as the pandemic took hold. She said her inability to fly during that time inspired a similar sense of longing her character had, symbolizing a past normal she had taken for granted.
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When the airport reopened, she went and took as many pictures as possible, making a note of each plane model and tail number. But other inspiration largely came from her immediate surroundings on the west side of the city, where the book is largely set, calling out the tract housing in the Sunset, a bus stop at 19th Ave. and Taraval St., and the Stonestown Galleria mall.
“That was the city for me on a daily basis, so it felt natural to set it there,” Folk said. She found that most movies and TV shows otherwise highlighted just one angle of the city: a sweeping view of the Golden Gate Bridge or Fisherman’s Wharf, maybe with a shot of Russian Hill or the Mission District thrown in for good measure. “It felt more real: This is where a regular person might live in San Francisco.”
An aerial view of the Richmond District in San Francisco.
Getty Images/iStockphoto
To tap into her character’s voice, she sought inspiration from a literary classic that she first read a children’s version of when she was about 10 years old: “Moby-Dick.” As she was crafting “Sky Daddy,” she fused the narrator Ishmael’s reverence of whales with Linda’s obsession with planes.
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“He’s very catty about it — what’s a whale, and what’s not a whale, and which whales are better than others,” Folk said. “He calls them fellows and gentlemen, and I thought that was so funny. But also, planes are pretty whalelike in a way — the fact that they contain oil and serve as a symbol of humans trying to dominate the natural world and maybe come face to face with their hubris at some point.”
‘Weird girl fiction’
Early readers already familiar with Folk’s body horror-focused collection of short stories, “Out There,” weren’t too fazed by the plot while she workshopped “Sky Daddy.” She was surprised to find little pushback, discovering it was in good company alongside a growing subgenre of “weird girl fiction,” encompassing titles like Rachel Yoder’s “Nightbitch,” Miranda July’s “All Fours,” and Ottessa Moshfegh’s “My Year of Rest and Relaxation.”
“There’s an appetite for this kind of story that maybe wasn’t there as much 10 years ago,” Folk said.
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Author Kate Folk is pictured at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco on March 25, 2026.
Charles Russo/SFGATE
Content moderation has likewise become a more popular focus in media, with recent examples spanning Elaine Castillo’s 2025 novel “Moderation,” this year’s buzzy SXSW anthology horror movie “Grind,” and the remake of the 1978 exploitation film “Faces of Death,” starring “Euphoria’s” Barbie Ferreira and Charli XCX. For “Sky Daddy,” Folk wanted to facilitate a distance between Linda and the airport to give her character something to work toward while also exposing yet another dark side of San Francisco’s tech world, as Linda is seemingly unvexed by the graphic content she consumes day after day.
“I thought it was such a fascinating job that people have to do, to absorb all of the worst stuff on the internet on behalf of everyone else, so that we can open an app and not be bombarded with that most of the time,” Folk said. “It’s an interesting metaphor for the way labor is placed onto a certain underclass of people, at the extreme psychological peril of workers who are often in other countries and not well-compensated.”
Fandom takes flight
No officials from SFO have ever commented on “Sky Daddy,” as far as Folk is aware of. Completing her first novel has forever changed the way she looks at planes, as the story continues to resonate with a growing following of loyal readers.
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“I do get a lot of people sending me pictures from book club meetings where they made their own vision boards,” Folk said. “Which is what I hoped for, that people would run with it and make it almost memeable.”
FILE: A United Airlines plane takes off from San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The way she sees it, Linda’s obsession could stand in for any type of taboo desire people might have — something about themselves that they’re embarrassed of, or know they have to keep under wraps out of fear of judgment. “I think that makes her story universally relatable,” Folk said.
As we exited the airport and made our way into the parking garage, she teased that a film adaptation of “Sky Daddy” could be in the works. Folk has already completed her next novel — a psychological neo-noir about an insurance salesman in Iowa who becomes obsessed with his coworker. But for now, she’s focused on celebrating.
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On Wednesday at 7 p.m., Green Apple Books on the Park will throw a party in tandem with the paperback release of the book, culminating in none other than a group vision board.
“It’ll just be a sheet of paper that people can add stuff to if they want,” Folk said. “The collective unconscious.”