Mona Chalabi Turns Six Years of Interviews Into a Book on Class

Pulitzer Prize-winning data journalist Mona Chalabi has published her first book, Ten Lives: How What We Have Shapes Who We Are (2026), a six-year project built on anonymous interviews with Americans across income levels. The Iraqi-British artist, writer and journalist organizes that material into ten vividly fleshed-out characters. Each character represents a particular economic class, drawn in her signature hand-drawn style.

The book arrives with a clear target. Chalabi wants to break the silence around class in American public life, a silence she identifies in journalism and the art world alike. Her method is the same one that made her visualizations of Jeff Bezos's wealth, the Israeli government's starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, and the racial and gender biases in museum collections so widely shared. She pairs hard numbers with images that restore humanity to statistics.

How did the book begin?

Chalabi is blunt about its commercial origins. "The first line of the original manuscript said, 'I wrote this book because I was paid a shitload of money to write it,'" she told Hyperallergic in an interview. Her editor rejected the line, but the candor stayed in the project's DNA.

She pitched the book at the start of the pandemic, predicting a coming financial crisis. Her thinking has since shifted. The problem is not a crisis that arrives and passes, she argues. "The crisis is the system that we're in that is so broken." That reframing shapes the book's structure: inequality is presented as a permanent condition, not a cycle.

• Pitched during the early pandemic as a response to a predicted financial collapse
• Built on meticulous anonymous interviews conducted over six years
• Ten characters, each standing for a distinct economic class
• Includes reflections on her own financial struggles as a young journalist and after her mother's illness

Why ten classes instead of three?

The book refuses the usual shorthand of working, middle and upper class. Instead, Chalabi stratifies her subjects into finer gradations, arguing that the standard three-part model collapses real differences in how people live.

Her reasoning is personal as much as analytical. Class, she says, shaped who she is and how she moves through the world, yet public conversation treats it as unspeakable. "It's the way that someone like me can say, 'I'm an Arab, cis, heterosexual woman,' with total ease, but class doesn't really come into it," she said. "There's a dishonesty there."

The takeaway: Chalabi treats the refusal to name class as a form of dishonesty, and the book is her correction.

Where does the work sit in art history?

Chalabi works inside a long tradition of data visualization as political argument. The obvious ancestor is W.E.B. Du Bois's The Exhibit of American Negroes, which used meticulous hand-drawn charts to visualize Black American life at the turn of the 20th century. Chalabi carries that lineage forward with a refreshing directness about money, including her own.

Her career rests on a refusal she traces to childhood, when she was scolded for not observing "the etiquette of looking away." As she puts it: "As an adult and as a journalist, I have stared shamelessly."

That stare has institutional weight. Her visualizations have documented museum collections in which artists are overwhelmingly white and male. Her advocacy runs alongside the reporting: she donated her $15,000 Pulitzer Prize award to the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate, and she has fought for Palestinian rights since her teenage years.

The takeaway: Chalabi fuses statistical rigor with hand-drawn imagery, restoring dignity to numbers that record exploitation.

What comes next?

The audiobook, recorded shortly before her September interview in the West Village, posed its own problem: how to translate a visual book into sound. That process, and the book's reception, will test whether her mass-audience ambition holds — she has been, in her word, shameless about wanting the work to reach as many readers as possible.