Eat the Apple

“The Iliad of the Iraq war,” a “searing . . . powerful” memoir about the consequences of war on the psyche of a young man who did three tours of duty in Iraq (Tim Weiner, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author of Legacy of Ashes)

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, and ultimately redemptive, Young's story drops us unarmed into Marine Corps culture and lays bare the absurdism of 21st-century war and the manned-up vulnerability of those on the front lines.

“Inventive, unsparing, irreverent and consistently entertaining,” Eat the Apple is a modern war classic in the making and a powerful coming-of-age story (New York Times Book Review).

“A brilliant and barbed memoir of the Iraq War.” ―Maureen Corrigan, Fresh Air

“Some pages are tender and wistful, others repulsive, still others funny. The experimental, jagged account matches the disjointed life of the soldier . . . In writing about war, [Young] has found a purpose and his voice.” ―Economist

“Raw and powerful.” ―Observer