28/04/2026
What does it look like when ambition is actually shame in disguise?
This is the second of four books I read to prepare for my painting series A Certain Distance. And this one gave me my main character.
Casey Han graduates from Princeton with no money and too much pride. She moves to New York surrounded by investment bankers and people with family wealth — and refuses every offer of help. Her parents run a dry cleaning business in Queens. Her younger sister is obedient, careful, doing everything right. And Casey is somewhere in between — sharp enough to see the neediness and insecurity in everyone around her, but not quite able to see her own.
Her real passion is making hats. But her ambition keeps pulling her toward the things that look right — the prestigious connections, the right address, the things that put the most distance between her and Queens. The more she achieves, the more the distance grows between who she is and who she is performing.
Casey frustrated me personally as a reader. She repeats patterns. She self-sabotages. She can see the dead ends coming and walks into them anyway.
My character is different. She hustles until the end. She reaches the financial stability Casey never quite manages to hold onto. She wins.
And that is what makes the question harder.
Because if you make all the right moves — if you work hard enough, sacrifice enough, perform the right version of yourself for long enough — and you still end up standing in the rain in a pinstripe suit not knowing who you are anymore — then the problem was never the choices.
It was the distance between the life you built and the person you were when you started building it.
That distance is what my show is about.
Next: a book about what gets passed down when what you inherited is the feeling of not belonging.
A Certain Distance — Nocny Art Patrol, Warsaw. 08.05–05.06.2026.
