Mona Chalabi's Ten Lives Puts Her Own Money on the Page

Mona Chalabi has put her own bank statements into her first book. Ten Lives follows ten Americans over five years and asks how money, or the lack of it, shaped their lives. Chalabi also writes about her own finances, including an advance of $850,000, according to a Guardian review published on 11 November 2026.

An advance is the upfront payment a publisher makes to an author, paid before the book reaches a shelf. Chalabi is a former Guardian data journalist and illustrator, and she is known for turning numbers into charts and drawings. Here, the numbers are people.

Each of her ten subjects comes from a different step on the US income ladder. The book uses income deciles, which split a population into ten equal groups ranked by income. Each interviewee sits in one of the ten.

The top group is represented by Jacob, a New York investment banker who earns more than $500,000 a year. He is in the tenth decile, defined as household income above $272,000. At the bottom of the sample is Levi, in the third decile, which runs from $35,000 to $46,000. Kristina sits in the fifth, between $59,000 and $75,000.

Chalabi followed all ten people closely for five years. She also supplies a spreadsheet of her own freelance earnings covering the same period. Freelance work is paid job by job rather than through a salary, so income can rise and fall from one year to the next.

She has also reported buying a five-bedroom home in London for more than £1.5m. The house is one of the more concrete details in a book about what money can and cannot do. The price is in pounds, while the advance is in dollars, so readers should keep both currencies in mind when they compare the two.

What stands out most is the decision to put the author's own figures next to those of her subjects. Many books about inequality keep the writer at a distance. This one places her inside the same frame, with the same five-year timeline and a full set of earnings.

Chalabi's book is her first, and the Guardian's review of it was published on 11 November 2026. The facts here are simpler: ten people, one decade-by-decade ladder, five years of records and one author who has chosen to show her own.