Ten Lives by Mona Chalabi review – what if we were totally honest about our wealth?

The data journalist puts her own finances – and those of ten others from across the economic spectrum – under a microscope

How much do you earn? If the question makes you bristle – and I realise we haven’t even met – would you answer it if someone convinced you that your candour might just change the world?

In her deliciously original first book, the former Guardian data journalist and illustrator Mona Chalabi sets out to do precisely that. The result – a dazzling mix of journalism, data visualisation and memoir – is both a joy to read and a serious provocation. Chalabi takes aim at our silence and furtiveness around individual income and finances. “Our collective ignorance is sustaining an unfair system,” she argues. Unless we talk more openly about our personal wealth, we will never be able to tackle the economic problems causing insecurity and anxiety for us all.

Ten Lives is a riveting exemplar of financial transparency. It tells the stories of 10 individual Americans, exploring how their wealth – or lack of it – has shaped every aspect of their lives. There is Jacob, the New York investment banker earning more than half a million dollars a year who uses an elastic band as a wallet, for fear of squandering money. There is former teen gambling addict Levi, now trying to rebuild his life in his 20s, whose greatest concern about being interviewed is the shame of appearing broke. There is grad student Kristina, newly divorced and forced to choose between finishing her degree and raising her child. Her solution is surrogacy. Being paid to grow someone else’s baby is the only way she can expand her options for childcare and, as a result, for her life.

Chalabi chose her subjects, whom she followed closely over a five-year period, to represent us all. In her introduction, she asks us to imagine lining up every person in the US from the poorest to the richest, then dividing that line into 10 equally sized groups. Each interviewee comes from one of those groups, or deciles, meaning all 10 steps on the US income ladder are depicted. Jacob is 10th decile (household income more than $272,000), Kristina is fifth ($59,000–$75,000) and Levi is third ($35,000–$46,000).

And then there is the 11th subject: Chalabi herself. Leading by example, she reveals the size of her advance for this book ($850,000 – or, in her terms, a “shitload of money”), provides a spreadsheet of her freelance earnings for the same five-year period as her subjects, and admits to having been able to buy a five-bedroom home in London for more than £1.5m. Her candour extends to revealing her discomfort as an advocate for social justice who has become, undeniably, rich. “If we rise too far, there’s a risk we will become the very thing we have criticised,” she admits.

Frankness is Chalabi’s signature trait. The words and illustrations that make up this book are an exhilarating antidote to obfuscation and evasiveness of every kind. She loathes all “word smush” that disguises reality, and her own prose is succinct, blunt and sinewy. Take, for example, her withering criticism of George Orwell for conducting a narcissistic poverty safari with Down and Out in Paris and London. The book is an example, she believes, of “class cosplay”, written by “a rich boy who changed his clothing and, presumably, his accent, to pass as a ‘tramp’”.

Considering its bedrock is hard numerical data, Ten Lives is a deeply affecting book. Her subjects’ stories reveal how easily systemic problems such as lack of affordable healthcare or childcare can overturn lives in modern America. Chalabi herself has to pour her savings into paying for care for her mother after she suffers a debilitating stroke in the UK. What unites all 11 of them is a gnawing fear for their financial futures – irrespective of how much they earn. The corrosive individualism of advanced capitalism supercharges these fears, argues Chalabi, by indoctrinating us into a belief that “we cannot support one another or be supported when we need to be.” But this is patently untrue. The world is not entirely dog-eat-dog. We can and do lean on family, friends and communities when we need to. We help each other out because we are care – and we are far from driven by avarice alone.

Chalabi concludes that what is needed to feel financially secure – and therefore to free ourselves from the treadmill of acquisition – is a proper societal safety net. A well-funded government, in other words, that spends enough on healthcare, education and welfare. To get there, instead of railing impotently at Bezos and Musk and the rest of the ultra-rich elite, we could start by being more open about how much wealth we have – and how much we owe and rely on each other. Otherwise, we will all remain in the dark, unsure, unprotected, afraid. It’s a brilliant, radical argument, delivered with ingenuity and panache.