Mona Chalabi says her first book, Ten Lives: How What We Have Shapes Who We Are, turns six years of anonymous interviews into 10 characters that each represent a different economic class. In an interview with Hyperallergic, she linked the book to wealth and economic inequality in America and to her own financial struggles as a young journalist and during her mother’s illness.
Chalabi said, “The crisis is the system that we’re in.” She also said, “As an adult and as a journalist, I have stared shamelessly.” Those lines match the method behind the book: looking closely at how people live across income levels, then shaping that material into a narrative form that makes class visible.
In September
In September, Chalabi met with Hyperallergic in the West Village, where she discussed why she organized the interviews into 10 vividly fleshed-out characters. The structure matters because it does not treat class as a single category; each character stands for a distinct economic position, built from anonymous conversations gathered over six years.
The book’s title, Ten Lives: How What We Have Shapes Who We Are, points to a broader question about how money shapes identity. Chalabi’s work has already drawn attention for data visualizations about Jeff Bezos’s wealth, the Israeli government’s starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, and racial and gender biases in museum collections, so the book extends a visual and journalistic practice into long-form writing.
Ten Lives and W.E.B. Du Bois
Chalabi is a Pulitzer Prize-winning Iraqi-British journalist, writer, and artist. The award she received came with $15,000, and she donated that money to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate. That background helps explain why her new book reads less like a report and more like a structured argument about class, drawn from reporting methods she has used before.
She also placed the work in a tradition of data-driven storytelling that includes W.E.B. Du Bois. The difference is that Ten Lives uses interviews, not charts, to make the distribution of wealth legible, while still keeping the focus on how class is often trained out of everyday conversation from a young age.
How What We Have Shapes Who
Ten Lives is slated for 2026, but the larger point is already clear from Chalabi’s interview: the book uses personal experience and six years of anonymous testimony to show that class is not abstract. Readers interested in the mechanics of inequality get a book built from lived detail, not statistics alone, and the open question is how those anonymous subjects across income levels were chosen.
