Mona Chalabi drafted the introduction to her forthcoming book – an exploration of wealth, class and ever-widening income inequality – while flying first-class, having secured an $850,000 advance for Ten Lives: How What We Have Shapes Who We Are. She wrote the second draft a year later – this time in a Pret in the waiting area of a south London hospital, pausing at intervals to check her now near-empty bank account or to cry.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning data journalist and illustrator – known for her ability to translate dry statistics into simple visuals that elucidate societal realities with thunderbolt clarity – had pitched her idea in 2020: to address a lack of “honesty and good critical discourse when it comes to class”, she would divvy the vast spectrum of household income in the US into 10 brackets and find a participant from each one willing to let her in on every aspect of their financial life. (“Are you going to be guarded? Or are you going to sit there and casually tell me how much you paid for your house? That was the criteria.”) Although she had no idea at the time how drastically her circumstances would change, being as explicit about her own finances as the single mum who becomes a surrogate to help pay for her daughter’s childcare, or the panicked banker staring down the barrel of an expensive divorce, was always part of the plan.
Which is not to say she found it easy to be so honest. “I fucking hated it,” Chalabi, 39, says now over a shared slice of cake at a bakery off the Strand, her long dark curls pulled into twin braids, a row of mismatched gold hoops in each ear. But she wanted to show how money shapes our identity from the moment we are born; how it’s bound up in feelings of insecurity or shame that prevent us talking about it; and why we could all benefit from doing so more often. And so: “I really didn’t want to do it, but it was also like… I can’t not.”
But a twist of fate meant her “big, radical act” of financial candour would be even more exposing than she feared. Raised in east London by doctor parents who immigrated to the UK from Iraq, she was living in New York, and earning comfortably into six figures between freelance work and a role at . Then, in the midst of the pandemic, her mother suffered a devastating stroke. Mona suddenly found herself living in the house she’d recently invested in back in London, providing round-the-clock care for her mum together with her older sister and the agency nurses they hired to work rotating 12-hour shifts, at a cost of £44,000 a month. She crammed in what work she could manage between sourcing medical supplies, driving back and forth to hospital appointments, visiting and invariably dismissing potential care homes, and watching her savings disappear.
“The experience of my mum completely shook me,” says Chalabi, who was warned she would lose her house if she continued to spend more than she was earning on at-home care. What happens next is shattering, and yet no one is more keenly aware than Chalabi of her family’s good fortune. Yes, she had cash in the bank, but she also had contacts, a support network to lean on, the wherewithal to navigate endless paperwork and the freedom to move across an ocean to be at her mother’s side. Painful personal experience had proved a central point of her book: wealth is about more than just money.
“The amount of time I had to take away from my desk could never have happened if I had had a nine-to-five,” she says, clear-eyed about her privilege. “That’s what’s so vulnerable for me about sharing these numbers. Not only do I think you will have less sympathy for me, I actually think you have less sympathy for me. Because as agonising as my story was, somebody else who did not have the option of private healthcare at all would have lost their parent sooner than I did. And I got extra time with her. And I got less time with her than I would have done if I had had more money.”
The author, who has returned to New York, was reimbursed most of the roughly £80,000 she spent while her mum lived with her in London, an outcome she’s still conflicted about. “I was like: that’s fucked up, that’s the communal pot.” She was refunded because the local NHS authority found that her mother should not have been discharged from hospital without a more robust care plan in place – those are the rules, but she worries that it doesn’t feel entirely fair.
Chalabi spent five years keeping up with the lives of her interviewees, and their revelations bolster her argument that it’s virtually impossible to feel financially secure in a hyper-individualistic, capitalist society. Regardless of the factors informing their relationship with money, her 10 wildly different protagonists all had one thing in common: worry. “The fear was so intense from everyone,” she says. The number on a person’s payslip is not the full picture. Do they have dependents, debt or a disability? Parents who helped them buy a house or a spouse to cover the bills if they lose their job? And where would they be if that spouse walked out? Writing the book also forced her to confront her own “money dysmorphia” – to ask why, despite being objectively better off than the vast majority in the US, she still wears mostly second-hand clothes.
Although the author is now “much more realistic about how much financial security I have”, the real lesson she’s taken away from the past few years is that “actually, we are never really safe as individuals. It’s always all about the collective you have around you.” Chalabi believes we should be willing to discuss class and its implications as honestly as we do race or gender. Because the more we acknowledge systemic unfairness, the more likely we are to recognise when we’re helping to uphold it. Perhaps by observing a polite silence around salary (“a disaster”, she says), which allows your employer to pay others less for the same work. Or being suspicious of people who claim benefits you’ve never been forced to rely on. She hopes her readers come away being “more thoughtful about how money shapes our identities and then more forthcoming about those facts, instead of hiding them” – encouraged to think not just about what they have, but also about what we owe each other. Maybe then we’d all be better off.
Ten Lives by Mona Chalabi (Penguin, £25) is published on 12 November. Tickets for the author’s appearance at Southbank Centre on 18 November 2026 are available here
