In the book Moral Disorder, Margaret Atwood depicts the themes of fractured identities, filial relationships, and gender roles. Nell is the protagonist of the stories, which focus on her ‘growth’ and evolution. What are the difficult ‘choices’ that Nell makes, and how does she take responsibility for those choices? How does the author trace Nell’s growth in the stories over the years and at different phases of her life?

Moral Disorder is an intriguing patchwork of eleven stories that follow the life of Nell from girlhood to her twilight years. Each story is a snapshot of a different time in her life and focuses on the role of her relationships. The opening piece of the novel introduces Nell and Tig, an elderly, married couple, facing an uncertain future.
The book goes back to an 11-year-old Nell who excitedly knits a layette for her unborn sister. She reads a book on household advice and envisions a perfect life ahead.
As a young adult, Nell rebels against her mother's stern conventions. She carves a niche for herself as a freelance book editor. She falls in love with a married man, Tig, who has two children. Nell and Tig decide to leave the city and adopt a rural life. They learn to farm, grow vegetables and venture into animal husbandry. She experiences the joy of motherhood and the bliss of growing old with the man she loves.
As an older woman, Nell confronts the mortality of life with aging knees and parents at the edge of death. She realizes the transient nature of her identity, governed by relationships. As she stumbles along life with varying degrees of idealism, opportunism, and cluelessness, she understands both, the meaning and the futility of life.

All that anxiety and anger, those dubious good intentions, those tangled lives, that blood. I can tell about it or I can bury it. In the end, we’ll all become stories. (Moral Disorder)

Atwood uses the short story genre in order to demonstrate how people are stories themselves, how we learn about story, and how the idea of "story" affects us. Using the first person perspective in many of the stories allows the reader to better understand Nell, to understand the theme of self-awareness and growth. However, switching out to the third person perspective allows us to better see the complete picture, like stepping back from a painting. Fractured storytelling through multiple perspectives shows us the fractured identities of the characters. People are fractured: their identities are a mishmash of their own perspectives, their own senses self-awareness, and the expectations and judgments of others.
People are also products of the choices they make. Using the non-chronological approach to storytelling helps Atwood show the end result of Nell's choices and then trace back the person she becomes through the choices she makes. Nell's very act of remembering her earlier decisions is in itself taking responsibility for them. She would not be troubled by her memories if she didn't seek to learn from them. This is reinforced by the introduction of Lillie and her experience with Alzheimers—the very opposite position of Nell's focus on memory.

In Moral Disorder, the central character, Nell, makes a variety of difficult choices about whether to have a family, her relationship with a married man, and managing her relationship with the man's family after he leaves his wife and marries Nell. Margaret Atwood traces her growth by breaking down Nell's story into different short stories and presenting them to the reader in a non-chronological order.
Nell ultimately takes responsibility for her choices by caring for her family members, renting a house for Oona, and learning to adapt to Tig's children—even if she can't help but beat them at Monopoly. Despite her tendency to daydream and fantasize about other lives, Nell grows from the little girl who resented her mother's pregnancy and yearned for freedom to a woman who has strong social ties and sacrifices to meet the needs of those in her life.
Atwood presents the stories in an intriguing way. The book opens with Nell and Tig in the morning, elderly and contemplating the news. The next story focuses on Nell at 11. Atwood switches perspectives, times, and narrators to chart Nell's growth—showing that she's changed in many ways as she's gotten older. In this way, Atwood can show Nell's anxiety over the responsibilities of a family, her guilt over her parents' and sister's health problems, and the burden placed on her to care for so many, including the ex-wife of her husband.