Did the Pandemic Ever End?

Kiese Laymon interviews Chi Rainer Bornfree and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan about their epistolary pandemic memoir, “The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once.”

By Kiese LaymonMay 28, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

• History

I’M TRYING TO remember the time of day I started reading Chi Rainer Bornfree and Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan’s new book The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once: A Pandemic Memoir. I know I was in Houston. 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 ever since that time of day I somehow can’t remember.

This book is necessary and devastating. It is friend work, love work, heart work: ​​100 letters written over four years, from March 2020 to May 2024, by two friends, parents, writers—one an academic, one a recovering academic—as they kept their eyes on the pandemic. They were writing about what everyone else was writing around.

Ragini and I are colleagues at Rice University, though we hadn’t really started working together when she sent me an early version of the manuscript back in 2022. At the time, it was divided into two parts: “the cave” and “the portal.” From 2023 to 2024, they wrote the back third of the book, titled “the woods.” I talked with Chi and Ragini about their journey from the cave to the portal and into the woods over email and Zoom in April 2025.

¤

KIESE LAYMON: When I got your manuscript, I was so excited. At the time, I was co-writing a TV show set in Eastern Kentucky. One of the characters I created was this man named Jim Who Rides a Bike. Jim was unhoused; he biked around town with a COVID-19 mask tucked under his chin. And the other executives were adamant: We cannot remind people of COVID, no matter what—whether the character was comical, whether the character was tragic, whatever. We can’t sell that now.

And then I got your book. I felt thankful, and honored, that people were out there doing the work that I had been unable to do. I was up here trying to write a goofy TV show—and you were actually reckoning with disaster, and repair, and disaster again. I wonder if we can start with what this book is doing—or, maybe, what it wasn’t supposed to do but did anyway.

RAGINI THAROOR SRINIVASAN: Since our book came out, I’ve been joking that it’s a book nobody wants, about a time nobody wants to remember, written by two people who nobody thinks should tell this story.

Chi invited me to exchange weekly letters with them starting in March 2020. But we didn’t start thinking about crafting those letters into a book until a year later. By then, most people had decided that COVID was over. The initial burst of enthusiasm for COVID literature was gone. Agents and editors were tweeting that nobody wanted to read about the pandemic, and the US government was well into the deeply shortsighted vaccine-only COVID mitigation policy.

So, we weren’t supposed to keep writing about the pandemic in 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024—just like we weren’t supposed to keep masking or testing—but we’re pretty stubborn, the both of us! We kept at it; it felt like looking directly into the sun.

CHI RAINER BORNFREE: One of the lines in my very first letter to Ragini was that I could “use the sense of building, weaving something.” Those verbs speak to that dynamic of disaster and repair you mentioned.

All of us needed to repair our sense of this world that had been blasted open, and also our sense of ourselves in the world. Many of us hoped that the repaired versions of the world and ourselves could be better than before. But Ragini and I didn’t abandon that hope. We stayed with it.

This book is a case study in the transformative effect of paying attention. That’s all we did. But in this mega-hyped attention economy, choosing how we pay attention is actually a small miracle. Yes, we paid a ton of attention to COVID, when most people were eager to forget. But also, we claimed the time to listen to each other, to ourselves. I paid attention to the quiet voices inside myself even in the outrageous, enervating wash of news—that’s what gave me the courage to do things I had needed to do for a long time. Like leave academia. Like change my pronouns. Like talk to my parents about my partner’s experience of being the only African American person in a white family.

RTS: I’m glad you said that, because I think that’s why we kept writing. We were in tune enough to know what COVID—despite its horrors—was making possible for each of us: who it enabled us to become, the lives it empowered us to build.

I think we also knew that one day, the world would need and be ready for a COVID book. Not just any COVID book, but one like ours, with its three distinct features: it is co-written, it unfolds in real time, and it acknowledges that the pandemic didn’t end. Co-written because the pandemic is a lesson in interdependence. It gives the lie to the fiction of individuality. It is about our shared vulnerability—the dream of we. You can’t tell the story of COVID alone. In real time because we have lived through many years of erasure and revisionist history, coupled with the fallibility of human memory. We are living through it still. Real-time documentation holds us and the world accountable to what we knew, when we knew it—and to the world we wanted, before we forgot it. Finally, at the levels of form and plot, the pandemic in the book never ends. Because it hasn’t ended. And it won’t. There is no going back to the way things were.

When you sent me the first draft of the manuscript, it was called The Portal—a reference to Arundhati Roy’s April 2020 essay “The Pandemic Is a Portal.” Let’s talk about that image—the portal. How did we move from The Portal to The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once?

CRB: That Roy essay—I fucking love that Roy essay—because she says, so sharply and so clearly, not just that the pandemic is a portal, an opportunity, but exactly what I was feeling, which was that “nothing could be worse than a return to normality.” Normal was sleepwalking through life without an awareness of its preciousness. Normal was climate change and racist violence and ignoring the reality of all that and going to work. If the pandemic could be a portal away from that version of normal, then this fear and death and suffering could be—not worth it, but … not wasted. As a species, we haven’t lived up to that promise. The word “portal” comes from the Latin “portare,” which means to carry. For us, these letters were a way of carrying each other through this time and into new versions of ourselves.

RTS: I taught a class last semester on the literature of reverse migration, and we did a unit on the idea of “the return to normal.” I included Roy. Undergraduates are young—some were in eighth grade in spring 2020—and so while they recognize that there was a world-historical rupture, they don’t necessarily realize that the pandemic was a portal. Roy’s essay floored them with the knowledge of all we might have had, and the tremendous losses we have sustained—in healthcare, education, climate mobilization, social welfare.

If we had kept our original title, I wonder if it would have left readers with that brutal feeling of loss. The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once is ironically more optimistic. We’re hurtling toward the end, sure, but it’s ever unfolding. Every moment unfolds another opportunity to intervene.

This is a book about COVID, but it’s also about friendship. It’s really unleashed here, in a way that I think will be welcoming to readers. Can you say more about that?

RTS: Chi and I had countless conversations while we were writing the book, laboring over every letter title and plot detail. One question we kept asking ourselves was, what is the book about? It’s occasioned by COVID and responds to pandemic discourse, but what is it about? In my memory, Chi thought the book was about love, and I thought it was about conflict. And actually, it is about both—because it’s about friendship.

One of Chi’s many moving, wise letters, written on December 10, 2022, is called “choice of errors.” We were all faced—we are still faced—with impossible decisions in impossible times. How do we explain our decisions and errors to our friends? How do we receive theirs? Within the conflict, where’s the love?

CRB: I can confirm that memory about our differing views of what the book is about!

I will say that when people talk to me about the book now, friendship is far and away the thing they mention most often. In a way, I think that reading this book, and having to hold two perspectives equally in your mind—that reading practice is the same as the practice of friendship, or of love more generally. And I think that’s one of the key lessons of the book: that two things can be true. In fact, two things that feel diametrically opposed can be true.

Heraclitus said much the same thing when he wrote, “The road up and down is one and the same.” Meaning the two opposite ways, there and back, are two parts of a single truth, a single road. The drama of this book centers on these two friends going very different ways, and yet on the same road. And in the letters, when I reread them, I see myself trying to come to terms with this paradox, this duality, again and again, in all these different shapes.

This book is utterly communal. 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. And yet I know that a lot of publishers you pitched this to thought it wasn’t universal enough. Is “universal” even the right word here?

CRB: My question is, What kind of universal? The “universal” is traditionally a very Western, Eurocentric idea. When I co-taught a class called Rupturing the Classical Tradition at Princeton with Brooke Holmes, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, and my partner Micah Bornfree, Dan-el introduced me to a touchstone quote by Aimé Césaire: “I have a different idea of the universal […] a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.” I’d like to think this book contributes to the project of enriching our universal coexistence through these two particular lives. Maybe that’s what you mean by communal.

RTS: Exactly. I’m a kind of anti-anti-universalist postcolonial critic myself, and I agree we are making a particular, communal, and universal offering here.

In the past few weeks, Chi and I have been hearing from readers—some of whom know us, others who don’t. Almost every reader has said that the book works as a portal back into their own pandemic lives. They’re checking their emails, calendars, and photo streams to see what they were doing, thinking, and feeling on the dates at the top of our letters. They’re asking anew when the pandemic ended for them—and why. I really think one of our dreams for the book is being realized: it is returning readers to themselves.

This book is real. It is true. Yet I feel like you have also made a novel I’ve been waiting for. I don’t think you’d even call it a novel, though, would you?

CRB: Ha! Well, it’s not a novel, in the sense that nothing here is fictional. But it’s novel itself, in the sense of being a new format. And we did eventually, in the editing process, talk about things that novelists talk about, like scene and characters and narrative arc. To be honest, there was a point when I wanted to turn the book into an autofictional novel! But Ragini held out for the documentary aspect of the project, and if she hadn’t, we’d probably still be working on it.

RTS: The book definitely has novelistic aspects. Early on, Chi directed us toward the question of plot. Also, we are not Chi and Ragini in the book; we are C and R. For the book to have drama, certain events were brought to the fore. For C and R to compel readers, their differences had to be amplified. We made ourselves characters and gave our lives the texture of plot, while writing the book in the real-time present tense. It felt like a daring narrative experiment.

So, I guess I’m saying I already think the book is autofiction! But also, yes, I am committed to the book’s identity as a historical artifact. There are 20 pages of endnotes. We have the receipts.

CRB: Actually, that’s something one of our early readers was curious about—how did knowing that these letters would be read more widely change what we wrote? I always remember this line from one of our book proposals: “Through the letters, we licensed each other to become the heroes of our own lives.” I think the process of writing a time we knew was historic did summon us to think of ourselves as characters, in an alchemical, autofictional way.

I wonder how, and if, you felt any obligation to make the pandemic and its effects—cultural, political, social—pleasurable. As artists, how did you think about pleasure—in the crafting of the letters you wrote to one another, but also in the decision to give this work to the world, to make this offering?

CRB: The first thing that comes to mind is that it wasn’t about pleasure, not at first. It was about survival. Especially when we got started, it was just … necessary for me. I just can’t express how much of a lifeline it was to write and receive these letters. I guess that’s a kind of pleasure, right? It’s like—Oh, I’m surviving. I’m still here. That’s what it felt like, more than anything. And there came the pleasure of Oh, I caught something of the moment, and I put it down before it got away from me. The pleasure of crafting a sentence.

My brain keeps saying, No, it was suffering, it was rejection, it was scary and vulnerable to put it out there. But you’re making me remember the pleasures of solidarity, of building a community of COVID-aware folks, of creating a small world that felt new. And there’s pleasure in being here, right now, with you. If even one more person reads the book today and gets it—gets that we have to clean the air, that masking is an act of courage and care—then that’s a profound, even revolutionary pleasure.

RTS: You said “pleasure,” and honestly, my first thought was pain. But there was pleasure in saying: Our thoughts matter. Our friendship matters. Maybe we’re not frontline workers, policymakers, or celebrities, but we see what is happening, we hear the pandemic’s call to change our lives and worlds, and we won’t forget.

In March 2020, Chi and I were in our mid-thirties, with young kids, families, students. I’d be breastfeeding, then talking to my grandmother in India, then Zoom-teaching undergrads stuck in their childhood bedrooms. I was moving across these relational worlds, feeling responsible for the future, wanting to rise to the occasion.

So, more than pleasure, I’d say this is a book about desire: the desire to survive, to be equal to the moment, and to know what your work is. And at this moment, as so much I love—including the university—is under attack, I feel clear about what I have to offer, from organizing for Houston public schools to mentoring the next generation of humanities scholars. Our letters made that clarity possible for me.

You both shred and honor time in this book. What do you think about the “now” of it all? How present is “now” in your bodies, and your expectations of tomorrow?

RTS: Oh, this “now” is painful: watching the malevolent destruction of lives; the willful dismantling of institutions; the celebration of violence, vulgarity, ignorance, greed. One of my graduate students this semester kept asking in disbelief, “What time is it?” I couldn’t say.

But here’s a partial answer, with reference to Nicholas Dames’s essay “Departures and Returns,” in which he argues that we should typologize, not analogize, the past and present. He puts it like this:

Analogies between instances separated in time are never entirely convincing […] Typology invites us instead to look at the old stories as speaking of us, right now […] invit[ing] us to see the past as offering an essence to be tapped, not a comparison to be parsed. It tells us: what happened in the past is.

So, it’s not that COVID is like the Spanish flu. It’s not that the rise of Trump is like the rise of fascism in Germany. It’s that they are the same things. The present is not like the past; it is the past.

CRB: Well, I’ll admit that I’ve been asking myself why anyone should read The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once right now, in the spring of 2025. I think I have an idea why people in the future will want to read this book. But why read it right now, as the United States slides into white supremacist fascism?

Not long ago, I was walking my dog and chatting with my neighbor about the news. She said: “This feels like COVID to me. It’s bad—and not everyone knows it’s bad—and I’m afraid to leave my house.” I’ve been hearing versions of that sentiment a lot. There’s a direct line between the early pandemic and where we find ourselves now. The polarization, the distrust of scientific expertise, the distrust of one another—the pundits and the historians are and will be writing volumes about these things. So, a historical connection, or congruence, might be one reason to read the book right now.

But to circle back to where we started—because of the real-time nature of the book, because it is this radical joint experiment in staying present, it’s the perfect book to read now. Today, we again find ourselves in a very scary moment that demands that we show up for each other, pay attention, and, in whatever small ways we can, become the heroes of our lives.

¤

Chi Rainer Bornfree is a writer, philosopher, and activist. They are the co-creator of AI for the People, an award-winning, multidisciplinary vision of a positive AI future. With a PhD from UC Berkeley, they have taught at Bard College, Princeton University, and New York state prisons; co-founded the Activist Graduate School; and served as US commissioning editor for The Philosopher (UK).

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is a widely published scholar of Asian American and South Asian literature and an assistant professor of English at Rice University. She is the author of Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone (2025). A book of essays on collectivity, What Is We?, will be out later this year.