All said and done has a remarkable status within Beauvoir’s enterprise of selfrecording : a corrective in the form of a supplement to her autobiography, a self-portrait, a sequel to the Memoirs, it is also characterized by its thematic composition which breaks the linearity of her life’s narration. This loose device testifies both to a new relationship to History and to oneself, impeding the closure of sense claimed for in the first pages of the volume. Beauvoir takes a step aside, away from the great narration of the Memoirs, as well as from the great narration of History, and finds new resources in the melancholy of the formless, to suggest the suspension of living experience, willingly freed from any tension toward an end.