Eat the Apple: A Memoir

Matt Young

Feb 2018 · Bloomsbury Publishing USA

About this ebook

"The Iliad of the Iraq war" (Tim Weiner)--a gut-wrenching, beautiful memoir of the consequences of war on the psyche of a young man.

Eat the Apple is a daring, twisted, and darkly hilarious story of American youth and masculinity in an age of continuous war. Matt Young joined the Marine Corps at age eighteen after a drunken night culminating in wrapping his car around a fire hydrant. The teenage wasteland he fled followed him to the training bases charged with making him a Marine. Matt survived the training and then not one, not two, but three deployments to Iraq, where the testosterone, danger, and stakes for him and his fellow grunts were dialed up a dozen decibels.

With its kaleidoscopic array of literary forms, from interior dialogues to infographics to prose passages that read like poetry, Young's narrative powerfully mirrors the multifaceted nature of his experience. Visceral, ironic, self-lacerating, and ultimately redemptive, Young's story drops us unarmed into Marine Corps culture and lays bare the absurdism of 21st-century war, the manned-up vulnerability of those on the front lines, and the true, if often misguided, motivations that drove a young man to a life at war.

Searing in its honesty, tender in its vulnerability, and brilliantly written, Eat the Apple is a modern war classic in the making and a powerful coming-of-age story that maps the insane geography of our times.

Ratings and reviews

I both liked and hated parts of this book. That's why 3 star rating. I feel like I'd have to read it again to fully understand it. I got that to become a Marine is to be mentally and physically broken. I didn't get that he felt proud of his struggle to achieve it, and that left me really wondering. Maybe I wasn't reading carefully enough. Or between the lines. The camaraderie, the physical and mental grind of deployment, the boredom, the rules they lived by, the huge sense of failing for not killing, their perception that Americans didn't understand or appreciate their efforts, that they were fighting an obsolete war - it's hard to accept as a reader. I felt he was the most clear talking about his " field fleshlight," masturbation, & the homoeroticism they experimented with, that they experienced. No way to avoid it and I'm sure it ruffled a lot of feathers. This seemed a book about a lost manhood. Of what it means to be a man at war. That's why as a woman it was harder for me to relate to - as a human, yes. He seems very, very young. The honesty in how he picked on "Lawrence," was heartbreaking. But it seemed there was more to that part of the story. I might read his later work.

Hit home in a non hitting home way.

About the author

Matt Young holds an MA in Creative Writing from Miami University and is the recipient of fellowships with Words After War and the Carey Institute for Global Good. His work can be found in Tin House, Word Riot, the Rumpus, and elsewhere. He is a combat veteran, and lives in Olympia, Washington, where he teaches writing.