Eat the Apple

Eat the Apple  by Matt Young   251 pages

This memoir follows Marine Young (not former – once a Marine, always a Marine) from enlistment through three deployments to Iraq. Although touted as “daring, twisted, and darkly hilarious,” the vividness and brutal honesty of this narrative hit way too close to home to be amusing to me. The remaining appraisal says it much more eloquently than I can:

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.

Posted By:  Regina C.