What's your big secret? Maybe it's that you're part of a really embarrassing fandom or maybe it's your gender identity. Maybe your secret is a source of immense pleasure that the world at large just can't understand or maybe it's a source of great shame and acts as cross you must bear. Whatever it is, *Sky Daddy* by Kate Folk is a really fun book for the overly self-concious about how to manage these confusing and challenging parts of yourself.
Linda is, by all external markers, completely unremarkable. She's a young woman with a crummy apartment, who only has a single friend who works with her at the same dead-end job moderating online comment sections. The one thing of interest about her is her obsessive sexual and romantic attraction to planes, with her greatest wish in life being to die in an aircraft.
Linda believes that if people find out out her misplaced love of planes, she will be disqualified from participating in polite society and that's an all too familiar feeling for me and I'm sure many others. Your life becomes a shrine to this odd thing about you, your every action becomes about sereptitiously moving towards that desire or spending all your mental energy trying to keep it under wraps.
Almost every character in the book carries a secret like this, childhood traumas, affairs, loneliness, there's something everyone is burying beneath the surface. What made the book such a hypnotic read is seeing what happens in the aftermath of these secrets coming out.
Everyone was right to be worried, the truth being revealed ends friendships, derails careers, and sends people into the pits of despair. It hurts but you also see people walk so much more freely now that they aren't chained to the dark hidden parts of themselves.
My takeaway from the book is that the life you will live if you spend every day denying who you are is so much more painful than the initial discomfort of being honest with people who care about you. Coming out with the truth might be difficult and embarrassing, but you get to walk around with a much lighter heart if you do
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