By Matt Young

1.

Memory isn’t fact; it is an act of creation. Memories are built and built again from one remembering to the next, each new construction augmented by the sum of our experiences between the remembering.

A simplification: external stimuli trigger the formation of a memory so that we associate the stimuli with an emotion. Then our brain makes a protein bridge between neurons, which is then moved to the hippocampus.

So memories are physical things—not just images floating around in our gray matter—but there is no core memory. No unimpeachable truth that exists somewhere in our brain.

Each time we remember, we make a new construction based on the most recent recalling filled in with the lived moments between the two, and each new construction moves farther and farther from the reality of it. Memories then are adaptations—a sanitized way to say lies.

Reality and memory can never overlap—the liminal space between the two is fiction (another nice way to say lies). By proxy, the people who populate those memories are not real either.

Try explaining that to someone who’s pissed off at how you’ve portrayed them in your writing.

2.

There were many things online trolls jumped at in my memoir, Eat the Apple, after it came out in 2018: the post-modern millennialism of the forms, the lack of antiwar sentiment, the abundance of antiwar sentiment, the descriptions of masturbation, the references to masturbation, the metaphorical use of masturbation.

The essay that garnered the most negative attention was about a junior Marine who killed himself.

I received death threats and emails and tweets frequently telling me to kill myself and to be sure to put my daughter and wife out of their misery first. Someone repeatedly contacted my agent, my publisher, the magazine I edited for at the time, the HR department at my college trying to upend something in my life.

I don’t know who the person was or is, but I empathize. At least, now.

3.

I empathize because the essay I wrote, which situates me and my inhumanity as the reason for that suicide, is of course not a full view of the situation. It’s not reality. That essay isn’t about reality. It’s not even really about a kid who killed himself. It’s an indictment of the generational trauma the military inflicts, and an indictment of myself for buying into that system whole hog.

I wanted that revelation to hit hard. So, I dehumanized myself by isolating narrative moments—craft-speak for cherry-picking—so that I, as a character, became a villain. Then I heightened the tension even more by not writing the junior Marine’s name or really anything about the junior Marine aside from broad brush strokes, so that kid could’ve been anyone’s brother, or son, or husband, or father.

4.

In the essay, those cherry-picked details make it sound as if I am the sole reason for the junior Marine’s suicide. That is (likely) untrue. But he’s dead, so no one can ask him and he can’t defend himself. And even if I haven’t used his voice, I’ve spoken for him. I’ve remembered reality, created a truth.

What would I have done had I stopped and thought about it then? I might have tried to de-center myself, create a fuller picture of the junior Marine like I do for other Marines and friends who have died and are in my book.

I do think now, that I wanted to invite punishment because that moment felt like the apex of my awfulness. So I searched for something that fit the plot structure of the memoir and provided a climax, did some snipping and rearranging and voilà.

Fun fact: bending the narrative to an event is not a great motivational impulse for a writer. The most generous interpretation is that it’s shortsighted. A more realistic interpretation is that it’s manipulative and exploitative.

5.

I think about the essay and its impact often. It’s made me think about the ecology of a text more fully—and how we often ignore that and want what we write to exist in a vacuum.

But to pine for the vacuum is to pine for millennial gray, it is to pine for nonexistence, it is to pine for the most inoffensive motel wall art. You should not want your writing to be inoffensive motel wall art. Better, I think, to understand your writerly morals and ethics and full-throatedly say what you think you need to say and accept that your morals and ethics will change over the course of your career and life.

That said, my most recent book, End of Active Service, is fiction—fiction that draws somewhat heavily on my life, but fiction all the same. Maybe I felt safer masking real people as fictional characters after my experience (a false sense of security to be sure). And even if our memories are all fictions and we’re all a bunch of liars when it gets down to it, there is a nice level of plausible deniability that comes when the words ‘a novel’ are attached to whatever story you’re planning to tell.

________

Matt Young is the author of the memoir Eat the Apple (Bloomsbury, 2018), and the novel End of Active Service (Bloomsbury, 2024). His stories and essays have appeared in TIME, Granta, Tin House, Catapult, and The Cincinnati Review among other publications. He is the recipient of fellowships from Words After War and The Carey Institute for Global Good, and teaches composition, literature, and creative writing at Centralia College in Washington.