Why Fly: Seeking Awe, Healing, and Our True Selves in the Sky

by Caroline Paul

From the New York Times bestselling author Caroline Paul, a thrilling, gravity-defying book that takes us skyward to explore the art of aeronautics-and the human drive to live daringly.

Flying has long represented that beautiful, high-stakes human drive to invent, to explore, to experience. Caroline Paul has known it since she was twenty and learned to fly a single-engine plane for the first time. In her thirties, she moved to a paraglider; in her forties, a motorized hang glider. Now in her fifties with her long-term marriage having dissolved beneath her, she has again turned to the skies by way of a gyrocopter, finding that it's easier to learn a landing than a human heart.

Historically, she hasn't been alone in escaping upward. Alongside her own experiences over decades of flight, Why Fly includes the gripping stories of those through history who have defied the things that weighed them the Night Witches, Russian women who flew slow biplanes against the high-tech Nazi Luftwaffe; the famous female barnstormers of the 1920s, particularly African American pilot Bessie Coleman who traveled to France to earn her license after her own country refused her the chance; and the ultralight pilots who believed they could teach birds brought to extinction in their old habitat not just to return but to retrace their old migration routes by following humans in flight. Arranged in five parts, Preflight, Taxi, Takeoff, Flight, and Landing, Why Fly shows all the ways we've been reaching for flight for centuries. Along the way we flub, we crash land, we simply crash. Still, we want to fly.

But why? Why Fly reveals all.

256 pages, Hardcover

Published February 24, 2026

About the author

Caroline Paul is an American writer of fiction and nonfiction. Trained as a journalist and documentary filmmaker at Stanford University, she instead pursued a career as a firefighter, as one of the first women hired by the San Francisco Fire department. She worked most of her career on Rescue 2, where she and her crew were responsible for search and rescue in fires. Rescue 2 members were also trained and sent on scuba dive searches, rope and rapelling rescues, surf rescues, confined space rescues, all hazardous material calls, and the most severe train and car wrecks.

Source: Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Liralen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A meditation on flight, relationships, and adventure.

We were like those knitters who knit to pass the time in DMV queues and then unwind what they've done almost dispassionately, then knit again. (loc. 343*)

I read Paul's Fighting Fire a decade ago, and it's one of those books that I still think about on a regular basis. Now—Fighting Fire hits one of my more random reading interests, while I don't have a particular interest in flight. But Paul's writing is so tight and engaging, and it's so clear how much she loves flying (and in particular, flying gyroplanes! I didn't even know gyroplanes were a thing) and how much she's thought about it. This is a love letter to flying, and also a love letter to a deteriorating relationship (I promise this makes sense in the book).

Why Fly travels through historical record and memoir and recent aviation events, mishaps and triumphs. It culminates in a cross-country gyroplane trip, and my gosh, while this does not make me want to learn to fly (which is just as well; flying lessons are not in my budget), it does make me want to backtrack and read Paul's Tough Broad.

One for flight enthusiasts, yes, but also one for those who are just curious.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.