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Lives of Girls and Women is the story is of Del Jordon, a precocious young girl who does not seem to quite fit in with the townspeople and country lifestyle of her small town, Jubilee. In each chapter Del faces a different trial or issue, which help the reader to understand the overall themes of love, friendship, sexuality, religion and death.

With subtlety and humor, Munro highlights the undertones of everyday activities and the complexities of various types of relationships. Del is greatly affected by the relationships she has with the people around her, some of whom can be seen as role models, while others are anti-role models. Del identifies and questions various character traits of the people most influential in her life (especially her mother) and tries to choose which characteristics she will adopt and which ones she will attempt to avoid as she constructs her own self-image. But ultimately, Del struggles to develop a concrete sense of self in what appears to her as an ever-changing, incomprehensible world. For to know herself, she must understand at least something about the world and her proper place in it.

Del reaches maturity in the final chapter, appropriately named, Baptism (signifying her rebirth). Throughout this lengthy chapter, Del undergoes a number of rebirths due to her newly discovered sexuality and her relationship with her first love, Garnet French. Del's final (and quite literal) 'baptism,' culminates in her realization that being in love has colored her perception of the world around her, in a dream-like, almost whimsical way. Like many who first fall in love, she has lost—or at least forgotten, temporarily—who she really is and what is important to her. And yet, choosing to be in love over being one's self is perhaps a necessary process. Del is stronger and more connected to her true self for having gone through her relationship with Garnet. This final rebirth helps set her on her proper path, and marks the completion of her move from childhood to adulthood.

Del's destiny is to become a writer. But she cannot become an artist, until she has come of age, an interconnected process (see Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Yet, in this case, the artist is (finally!) a young woman. Once Del has grown up, she feels that the only appropriate thing for her to do with her life is to write a novel. With this decision, Del moves from being an active participant in her own life to a more passive observer of the world around her. She has become wholly removed from her own life and decides to create a completely new one, in any way she sees fit. This narrative shift is unsettling for the reader because by this point, Del has become the author of her own story. On the other hand, the ease with which she moves from actor to writer illustrates just how closely the two are linked. To some extent, we are all writers of our own personal stories, our histories, and based on the choices we make, we are largely in control of our destiny.

Even before Del makes the decision to become a novelist, she describes her own life in a dramatic, fictionalized way. While waiting to see if Garnet will show up, she says:

"I combed my hair and waited, classically, behind the curtains in our front room.
Without diminishment of pain I observed myself; I was amazed to think that the person suffering was me, for it was not me at all; I was watching. I was watching, I was suffering."

Del's dramatic interpretation of this moment shows that she has already begun to feel removed from her own life as she becomes an observer of experience. In the epilog, as Del struggles with her writing, she explains that:

"It did not occur to me that one day I would be so greedy for Jubilee... [that] I would want to write things down. ..the hope of accuracy we bring to such tasks is crazy, heartbreaking. ..for what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together—radiant, everlasting."