When Friend of My Youth was published in 1990, it was a critical success. As Judith Timson notes in her 1990 essay on the work, it "was an instant literary event not only in Canada but also in the United States, where the writer and her work have garnered rave reviews." Many of these rave reviews, including those that Munro earned for Friend of My Youth, are due to Munro's unconventional style. Anne Boston, in her 1990 review of the collection for New Statesmen and Society, remarks on Munro's "fine disregard for convention," saying that the author "spins her narratives decades back and forwards, gathering lifetimes and whole groups of characters into the space of 20 pages." Specifically, Boston notes that the use of a present-day narrator to tell a historical story gives "Meneseteung" "added depth and distance."

Besides the temporal span of her works, critics also cite Munro's ability...