Eat the apple : a memoir

"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. Young 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 twenty-first-century war, the manned-up vulnerability of those on the front lines, and the true, if often misguided, motivations that drive 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.

Author Notes

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.

Reviews (5)

Publisher's Weekly Review

In this bold memoir, ex-Marine Young examines how war transformed him from a confused teenager into a dangerous and damaged man. Fresh from high school and with no direction, Young walked into a Marine recruitment center in 2005 and sealed his fate. Soon he was suffering the indignities of basic training before being deployed to "the sandbox" in Iraq, where he sweated, masturbated, shot stray dogs, and watched friends get blown up. Despite the constant misery and suffocating discipline, Young reenlisted twice more and even volunteered for Iraq on his last tour. Brief stints in the U.S. that blurred away into drunken violence and infidelity made war seem far safer to Young than civilian life. Eschewing first-person memoir conventions, Young, now a creative-writing professor at Centralia College, presents his experiences through a broad range of narrative approaches-second person, third person, first-person plural, screenplay, crude drawings, invented dialogue between various selves, etc. There's real risk of trivializing the material, but Young matches his stylistic daring with raw honesty, humor, and pathos. Comparisons to Michael Herr's Dispatches, about the Vietnam War, are apt, but where Herr searched for thrills and headlines as a journalist, Young writes from a grunt's perspective that has changed little since Roman legionnaires yawned through night watch on Hadrian's Wall: endless tedium interrupted by moments of terror and hilarity, all under a strict regime of blind obedience and foolish machismo. (Feb. 2018) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Kirkus Review

In this debut memoir, Young (English/Centralia Coll.) reflects on his experiences joining the Marine Corps at the age of 18 and his subsequent tour in Iraq.The author, who teaches creative writing and composition, uses a variety of literary styles, but he is straightforward about his own shortcomings: "You've chosen the United States Marine Corps infantry based on one thing: you got drunk and crashed your car into a fire hydrant sometime in the early morning and thinkbecause your idea of masculinity is severely twisted and damaged by the male figures in your life and the media with which you surround yourselfthat the only way to change is the self-flagellation achieved by signing up for war." Throughout the book, Young pays homage to many clear influences, not least Gustav Hasford's novel The Short-Timers (1979) and its film adaptation, Full Metal Jacket, as well as Anthony Swofford's Jarhead (2003) and Tim O'Brien's similarly episodic The Things They Carried (1990). The shock and trauma of war come into play in Young's stories, but he also gives equal time to discussions of boredom, masturbation, infidelity, shame, and regret, all rendered in a caustically humorous tone. With chapters such as "How to Ruin a Life," "How to Throw a Drunken Punch," and "How to Feel Ashamed for Things You Never Did," the author performs a certain amount of literary alchemy, using style and the space between memory and fiction to transform his raw experiences into self-lacerating works of art. By the time the end comes, after three combat deployments, he was a changed man. "I have acted like a bullet," he writes. "I entered lives and bounced and ricocheted and broken and torn. Now I am going to exit one life and that life will have no say."A real war story told in fragments by a gifted young writer trying to come to grips with his experiences. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* If Young enlisted in the U.S. Marines in 2005 out of a post-high-school lack of direction or general brokenness, the next half decade and its accompanying three tours of Iraq would take him further from any certainty and crush him into more and smaller pieces still. His memoir is creatively told in atmospheric and gut-checking essays, some of which include lists, quizzes, or the author's stick-figure drawings. As often as he is I, the author also addresses himself as you, past-me, the boy, this recruit, or we, the collective voice of his fleet. Young sobs in bathrooms; learns to shoot a gun; drinks too much; smokes countless cigarettes; masturbates to pass the time; cheats on his fiancée; loses friends; doesn't die; doesn't kill anyone else; doesn't know what to talk about with civilians. He gets hurt and now knows the places beyond his body where that hurt will live forever. Readers will wonder how people are expected to fight wars at all let alone survive them. Young's visceral prose, honed in college and writing programs after his tours of duty, confronts shame, guilt, and pain without flinching yet is beyond sympathetic to its subject; it is another act of service.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2017 Booklist

New York Review of Books Review

Picture This: Scrolling through Pinterest one day, Tomi Adeyemi saw something that would change her life: "a digital illustration of a black girl with bright green hair." The image, which burrowed into her subconscious, "was so stunning and magical" that it inspired her to begin an epic fantasy trilogy that draws equally from current events and African culture. The first volume, "Children of Blood and Bone," which enters the Young Adult list at No. 1, "is an epic West African adventure," Adeyemi explains, "but layered within each page is an allegory for the modern black experience. Every obstacle my characters face, no matter how big or small, is tied to an obstacle black people are fighting today or have fought as recently as 30 years ago." Drawing Fire: Did you know that the United States Army has an artist-in-residence program? No? Neither did the novelist Brad Meitzer, who discovered it while he was filming an episode of his cable TV show, "Lost History," at Fort Belvoir in Virginia. "They were giving me a tour and showing me their art collection," he says. "I kept thinking, 'Why does the Army have all this art?' " Meitzer, an enthusiastic researcher, soon discovered that "since World War I, the Army has assigned at least one person - an actual artist - whom they send out in the field to, well... paint what couldn't otherwise be seen. They go, they see, and they paint and catalog victories and mistakes, from the dead on D-Day to the injured at Mogadishu." The idea for "The Escape Artist" - which debuts this week at No. 1 on the hardcover fiction list - soon sprang into his head. "Imagine an artistsoldier whose real skill was finding the weakness in anything. 'The Escape Artist' started right there," he says. Other research for the book sent Meitzer to Dover Air Force Base, which houses "the mortuary for the U.S. government's most top-secret and high-profile cases. I became obsessed with it. In this world, where so much of the government is a mess, Dover is the one place that does it absolutely right," Meitzer says. "It is the one no-fail mission in the military. When a soldier's body comes home, you don't mess it up." The most interesting thing he learned there, which he obviously incorporated into the novel, was also the oddest: "When your plane is going down and about to crash, if you write a farewell note and eat it, the liquids in your stomach can help the note survive the crash. It has really happened. Next time you're on a plane and hit turbulence, you're going to be thinking of me." ? 'Layered within each page is an allegory for the modern black experience.'

Library Journal Review

Young, a fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good and creative writing professor at Centralia College, WA, tells of being a U.S. marine and serving three tours in Iraq in the mid-to-late 2000s. He does not sugarcoat the details of war or ask for forgiveness; in fact, he is not sure that he wants readers to thank him for his service. Each chapter is brief, three to four pages, and presented in varying formats, such as a screenplay and thoughts in first, second, and third person. Some chapters are written to the author's past self from his future self and one section is an apology letter to a cabbie he punched after his third tour. The difficulty of basic training is contrasted with the boredom and brutality of combat. Young's actions-cheating on his fiancé, surviving an IED explosion, holding a severed head-may cause revulsion among readers or may lead to sympathy. VERDICT This honest war memoir will shock and horrify, will cause readers to tear up, and will make them wish they could tell a 19-year-old marine that everything will be okay. Highly recommended for all collections.-Jason L. Steagall, Gateway Technical Coll. Lib., Elkhorn, WI © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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