In the 12 years she’s been married to her cowboy husband, Jolyn Young has relocated to seven different ranches in three Western states. During some of those moves, she was either pregnant or nurturing a newborn. Though the moves never became quick and easy, the mother of three learned a valuable lesson: Never Burn Your Moving Boxes, which is the title of her debut memoir, released in September 2023.
Growing up in a rural northern California subdivision, Young aspired to be a cowboy, even taking in backyard horses to train and riding them along the ditches while imagining she was trotting across the open range.
Two years after graduating from college, her dream came true when she was hired to work on a ranch in northern Nevada. To supplement her wages, she accepted freelance writing assignments for Western lifestyle magazines and regional agricultural publications. It wasn’t long before she met wild, free-range cowboy Jim Young, fell in love and unexpectedly started a family.
Thrust into the throes of marriage, motherhood and remote ranch life, Young found adventure, adaptability, strength and her own voice. As in any relationship, she faced challenges and difficult decisions, especially when it came to coping with her husband’s alcoholism and extended periods away from home for branding and seasonal works.
She chronicles her most intimate thoughts and details in the book with such vivid honesty and bravery that women of all walks of life can relate. However, she never intended to inspire or empower anyone; she wrote for herself.
“I started the book out of having nothing else to do,” says Young. “I didn’t have a job, and Jim was gone a lot, so I thought I’d give myself a project to focus on. I wanted to write a book, but thinking of a plot seemed so hard. Then it occurred to me that I could write about my life.
“It helped me realize my own strengths because I did things that were hard, and I thought I couldn’t do them,” she continues. “And I did them because I wanted a better future for myself and my kids. It’s easy to just get lost in the mundane and never realize how awesome we all are and how far we’ve come.”
It took her two years to complete her first draft, and she submitted the manuscript half-finished to Trafalgar Square Publishing in 2019 for consideration. It’s rare for a publisher to sign a new author for a book deal without a completed manuscript, but Young’s story was unlike anything the editors had read—and it was relevant to the resurgence of interest in Western television dramas like Yellowstone.
Unlike a TV drama, however, Young’s story was based on real life, with characters, plot twists and emotions so raw and genuine that Hollywood could not create it.
“What might be harder to believe than the idealized themes dramatized in fiction and reality television is the true story of a modern-day cowboy wife,” writes Rebecca Didier, managing editor of Trafalgar Square Books, in the introduction. “One who exists on the very edges of what most of us think of as ‘civilization.’ One who daily treads a line between wild and settled, often questioning whether she is trapped more by loneliness and the vastness of nature, or by the towns she must drive hours to visit when the need for groceries or a doctor appointment demand it.”
The memoir ends with the last—and most remote—big outfit the couple lived on in Arizona. That’s when Young says she “finally made peace” with their nomadic lifestyle.
“I was like, we move a lot; that’s what we do,” she says. “We’re here, and I don’t know for how long until we move again. I lived in two houses growing up, and my dad still lives in the last house we lived in, so sometimes it’s hard for me to move a lot with my kids.”
The writer finds humor in the lighter side of ranch life through social media posts, her blog, and a monthly column in Western Horseman magazine. The Youngs are currently based in southern Arizona, with their three children, Grace, 11, Milo, 8, and Levi, 5.
They started a business where Jim is contracted by private ranches and organizations to catch feral cattle. His wife handles the administrative logistics and continues to write and raise their children. She’s started on the sequel to her memoir.
Never Burn Your Moving Boxes: A True Tale of a Real-Life Cowboy Wife is available for $19.95 through Trafalgar Square Publishing and online booksellers. For more on Young, visit jolynyoung.com.
This article about Jolyn Young appeared in the October 2023 issue of Western Life Today magazine. Click here to subscribe!
