Nothing was Normal. Everything Was Possible.
For four years, C and R wrote letters, asking each other, and themselves: will we return to the old, broken world? Or make a new one? The resulting book is a brilliant, intimate glimpse into the courage to break with normal, the guts to change, and the complexities of friendship.
Foreword by Kiese Laymon
I’m trying to remember the time of day I started reading The End Doesn't Happen All At Once. I know I was in Houston. I know it was last semester. I know there was no sun in the sky. I remember my feet being cold. Most of all, it was the last time I asked the question, “What are we doing with this pandemic, other than trying, by all means necessary, to forget it?” I’ve been reading and rereading and feeling and fighting The End Doesn't Happen All At Once ever since that time of day I somehow cannot remember.
The End Doesn't Happen All At Once is necessary and devastating, at once singularly and utterly communal, and not just because we all experienced Covid in some way, but more because many of us have experienced attempting to hold on to someone while the world loses its breath. This book is a friend work. Love work. Heart work. A dynamic multivalent ceremony that never stops and refuses spectacle.
But I’d like to posit something else. I have a hard time remembering when I start the handful of novels that live in my body. Song of Solomon, for example, I have no clue the time of day I started that book. Sing Unburied Sing, same. I have no clue the time of day I started this triumph. Those two books, and now The End Doesn't Happen All At Once, seemed to be reading me long before I decided to read them. I am not suggesting that we read this book as a novel. I am saying that it will read you, patiently, gently, forcibly, mysteriously, and playfully, as only novels can.
There is no higher praise for this book. It is real. It is true. It is fiction. And it is absolutely as honest a book as I’ve ever read. Friendship, a site that has been brutalized by bad art, brutal policy and corporate architects, is revisited and really unleashed here in a way that saved the book I’m writing and actually saved the body writing the book.
Ragini and Chi have made the novel I’ve been waiting a lifetime for, and I don’t think they’d even call it a novel. I like that. I cannot wait to see what you allow the book to call you.May we all remember.
Kiese Laymon
October 19th, 2023
“I really feel like I got sucked into the pandemic portal with C and R. Such a story that unfolded. So many layers. So much drama. Made me feel rather parochial, and let's face it, staggeringly ill-informed and complacent about Covid.”
Anthony Morgan, editor, The Philosopher.”
“What C and R have written will never not be relevant. Mournfully.”
Brandon Shimoda, author of The Grave on the Wall, The Desert, Hydra Medusa
"Bornfree and Srinivasan document the extraordinary and ordinary moments of life already distorted in collective memory, bringing forth an urgent invitation: ‘Remember?’ This is radical mothering in action.”
Shruti Swamy, author of A House is a Body and The Archer
“A record of friendship, a novel in letters, a penetrating investigation of identity and risk— a manifesto for a more just and caring world.”
Johanna Skibsrud, author of The Sentimentalist, The Nothing that Is, Island, Fool
About the authors
Chi Rainer Bornfree and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan met as students at U.C. Berkeley, where they both earned PhDs in Rhetoric.
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is a writer, philosopher, and activist. With a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley, they have taught at Bard, Princeton, and New York state prisons. They are the co-founder of the Activist Graduate School, and the co-creator of AI for the People, an award-winning, multi-disciplinary vision of an ecological human-AI symbiosis. As assistant editor of The Philosopher magazine, they published a regular column and interviewed prominent public intellectuals. Chi has lived and traveled around the world. They now make their home in the Hudson Valley, NY, where they write, homeschool their two kids, grow vegetables, and organize Covid-safer events in their community. More here.
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is an assistant professor of English and Transnational Asian Studies at Rice University in Houston, Texas. She is author of the monograph Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone (Columbia UP, 2025) and a book of public-facing essays, What is ‘We’? (Agenda, 2025), as well as a co-editor of the award-winning Thinking with an Accent: Toward a New Object, Method, and Practice (UC Press, 2023). A former magazine editor and freelance essayist, Ragini has bylines in over four dozen scholarly and public venues, including online at the New Yorker, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Public Books. More here.
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-Ragini and Chi