245 Mary Gauthier
/Transcript
Full shownotes: https://www.adopteeson.com/listen/245
Haley: This podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing stated on it either by its hosts or any guests, is to be construed as psychological, medical, or legal advice.
You are listening to Adoptees On, the podcast where adoptees discuss the adoption experience. I'm Haley Radkey. What can I say about today's guest? She is an iconic songwriter, Grammy nominated folk artist, an outspoken adoptee advocate, Mary Gauthier. Mary's first book, Saved By A Song, the Art and Healing Power of Songwriting is a nurturing exploration of how sharing our stories can be a healing experience.
Her 2010 album, The Foundling, has become a soundtrack for many of us as we've grieved and processed our own adoptee stories. Mary and I talk about her path to songwriting, how important adoptee community is to her, and the power of story to overcome trauma. Before we get started, I wanted to personally invite you to join our Patreon adoptee community today over on adopteeson.com/community, which helps support you and also the show to support more adoptees around the world.
We wrap up with some recommended resources and as always, links to everything we'll be talking about today are on the website, AdopteesOn.com. Let's listen in. I'm so pleased to welcome to Adoptees On, the Iconic Mary Gauthier. Welcome, Mary.
Mary Gauthier: Hey, thanks. Thanks. It's great to be with you today. Thanks for having me.
Haley: I would love it if you would share some of your story with us. I know lots of folks know you, but for those who are new to you some of your adoption story and how you came to songwriting.
Mary Gauthier: Yeah, my story is long now. I'm, I'll be 61 March 11th. My adoption story is one of discovery. I was adopted at about a year old and it was something that was never kept from me.
I always knew I was an adoptee in a time when a lot of, a lot of adoptees weren't even told that they were adoptees. I came from St. Vincent's in New Orleans on Magazine Street. It was a home for un unmarried women, Catholic women. It was a Catholic adoption agency, or I don't even think it was an agency.
It was the Catholic Church running a, they called it an orphanage, which to me is always, never really fit well in my mouth, given the fact that I have four parents. I'm not an orphan. But the award orphan was used around the St. Vincent's and women in infants asylum. So I was adopted at a year old.
And I really didn't start trying to understand the impact of that until my fifties. I had a lot of struggle with drugs and alcohol. I had a lot of struggle with relationships that didn't last. And with with curiosity on my side and the guitar in my hand, I started using my talent, I guess for songwriting to use, use it to answer some of the questions.
And I wrote a whole record around my adoption story called The Foundling, and that necessitated me doing some really deep thinking around it and a lot of research and reading. Through a series of events that really wasn't something that I decided, I ended up back at St. Vincent's. I was brought there when I played a show in New Orleans by the show promoter.
And I didn't. I never thought of going back there as an adult. I didn't even think it was a place. I didn't know anything about it or wasn't curious or rather,_ and_ wasn't curious. I didn't have an need to go back there or see it or nothing like that. But I ended up back there and that opened this whole thing that led to writing these songs around what I'd call the Primal Wound after Nancy Verrier's classic book.
Haley: I know that you, once you started diving into adoption things that you spoke at the AAC and you got to meet Betty Jean Lifton.
Mary Gauthier: I did.
Haley: What was that like for us? Newer to the community?
Mary Gauthier: Yeah. Nancy Verrier was at that conference and I got to sit with her for a while and she came to my keynote address and I didn't really speak, I just played every song on the record that was my keynote address. I played it live, which was emotionally intense, obviously, and liberating for many.
And Betty Jean Lifton came to a show that I did in New York City before she passed away and I got to meet her. She was a radiant, beautiful woman whom I, when I met her, I was of starstruck. Read all of her books and really. Appreciated her pioneering work around adoption trauma and the consequences of secrets and lies. So yeah, I met our, I think two female heroes for those who have chosen to do some of the work. Especially I think my generation. I think this story's very different every decade around adoption, as I'm sure your show explores in depth. But for my generation, what really wasn't spoken about and Nancy Verrier and Betty Jean Lifton were the two women who not only wrote about it, but they spoke about it constantly.
And they really created the opening for us to have conversations around this that we were questioning. And I think it led to changes in laws and is still leading to adoptees getting their rights around their own birth certificate. They changed the world and I think that their work is monumental.
Haley: And so from my perspective, you're carrying on that work and that legacy. And I know the album, The Foundling has been profound and healing for so many of us. Can you talk about what it's like to be in the public eye and speaking critically about adoption in an industry where there are so many celebrities who are adoptive parents and who continue to glorify adoption and don't talk about the hard sign of it.
Has that cost you anything? Has there been any regrets on your part of speaking out your truth in that area?
Mary Gauthier: No, not a single regret. In fact, I think if I didn't do it. I let's, let me rephrase that. I had to do it, I had to do it to save my own life. I was drowning in things I didn't understand.
Why didn't my relationships work? Why did I become an alcoholic and an addict at age 12? 13. What was going on inside of me that made me different? And what was this pain? I felt sometimes when I was sleeping, like I was falling through space, untethered eternally, the horror of untetheredness.
I had to get it sorted. I talk a lot about using music and song as a transformative medium, and for me, I think writing the fouling was a lifesaver, literally a lifesaver. I think once we tell our story in an honest way, and if we do it through writing it, speaking it, singing it. We start to have agency in a way we didn't have before.
It gives us some power and if people don't like it, th that, that to me is honest to God, not something I can internalize. I have to like it and I have to be proud of the work that I do around it. Yeah the true story is not something people want to hear. They want the Disney version. They want the the consensus version, which is still a myth in many ways.
They want the cleaned up. It's it's easy version and it's not easy. And I've had people say the damnedest things to me after I play these songs, and it is almost as if I've startled them and they need to regurgitate what they've been told rather than search for what they think. Really, and I see that in their eyes that I've created a deep confusion. And so I don't rebut anything. But I stand by my work and I stand by my songs, and I will, I won't be silenced because I think that the more we speak, the more the real story gets out there. And the real story around adoption is trauma, period.
Haley: Thank you for saying so. Yes, I agree. I've, I read your book. It's so good. Loved Saving by Saved by a Song,
Mary Gauthier: Thank you.
Haley: The Art and Healing Power of Songwriting. And in it, you share, that you toured with The Foundling, and you played the songs and as you just said it's it healed something in you to write them, but just playing it over and over you're bringing up the most traumatic thing that has happened in an adoptee's life, right? The separation from our genetic connections. And what was it like to, decide to put that away and decide you're not gonna perform those songs anymore, but then write your story on paper for, again, the masses to read?
Mary Gauthier: What a great question. This is awesome. This. Type of questioning is so beautiful and I don't get it very often. So writing it into songs that I sang for about a year and then I really don't sing anymore was part of my healing. It was naming it. Claiming it. Owning it. And then doing the best I can to let it go.
This happened. It shaped me. I was wounded, but I don't have to spend the rest of my life limping. What I can do is find strength in the telling. And so I don't need to tell it over and over again. I need to tell it till it makes sense to me. And then let it go. And then I was asked to write this book and writing long form around the story was a different experience than writing songs.
In the songs, some of it was fictionalized. I didn't feel compelled to have to write exactly what happened. In fact, a song that does that is usually pretty boring. So in songs the fictionalization freed me in some ways to make it a story about all of us. In the book, I got into the particulars of my own story because it was partially a memoir, and that liberated me as well, so that I could look back over the story of my life and say if that hadn't happened, this wouldn't have happened.
And if this wouldn't have happened, I wouldn't have been given this thing that I really cherish. And I think that writing it long form really was an addition to the healing of writing the songs around it. It, it alchemizes it in a different way. I think if we're drowning, we've gotta find a lot of different kind of life jackets.
And for me, they're, both of the art forms long form and song, were were driven by this thing inside of me that needed to be shown the light. The healing light of truth. It really strengthened me. It took some of the weight out of the sorrow.
Haley: When you think about processing your adoption trauma, and you said you came to it in your fifties.
Mary Gauthier: Yeah.
Haley: How did that impact your relationship with your friends, your adoptive family? Did it? I know I'm turning 40 this year, and as I get older, I just don't care anymore. And I just say what I think. There's that freedom in aging and, but opening up our adoption wounds and seeing those hard things out loud can have a steep cost to our relationship. Are you willing to share a little bit about that?
Mary Gauthier: Yeah. The honest truth is I haven't talked to him about. I don't know if they liked it or not. I don't even know if they listened. They don't follow along with my art. I'm not sure they read my book. And that when I was younger really mattered to me that they didn't really listen.
And today it's yeah, I've got a lot of friends that don't read my book or listen to my songs and that my family is not invested in my art is fine with me. I, what I did do, though, is take care. When I wrote. I took real care, not to blame or to not to what I wanted to do, and what I did do is keep the focus on myself.
I have no understanding of their understanding. I don't know what they understand about what adoption did to me. We don't talk about it that much. My mom didn't, my birth mother and I met once on the phone. So when I say my mom, I mean my adoptive mom. My, my adoptive mom didn't tell me I was catatonic when I was adopted until I was 48 years old.
She didn't tell me I was catatonic. She didn't think it mattered. All she thought was that after a little bit of time being held by her, I started to respond. And so she figured, why, tell why, why tell Mary that. I'm like, oh my God. Oh my God. If you'd had told me, ah, nevermind, there's no point in going down that road because she doesn't understand.
So in some ways these conversations, I just don't have 'em with these people. I just don't. I have 'em with people like you cuz you get it.
Haley: There's a safety in the knowing. Yeah. And I think for myself, like I try to express the, we're different. We're, we're not getting it and because they didn't catch on to any of those things, it's oh, maybe it's not safe to say things that are even harder than just that.
Mary Gauthier: Yeah. And maybe that's just not the right people to have the conversation with. They're understanding. And my understanding very different. And it's not like I need them to see it my way. What I need to do is articulate how I see it so I can then find what I need to help me heal.
Whether they see it my way or not has no impact on whether I heal. I didn't know that when I was young. They can see it however they wanna see it. I'm the one who needs to articulate my truth uncensored so that I can then reach for what it is that I need.
Haley: Oh god. That sounds like that comes from such an empowered place like, Respect. That takes a lot of work to get to a point like that. Have you noticed in doing interviews and press for, I'm gonna compare it, so the release of The Foundling and then the release of Saved by a Song, has there been any improvement in the questions you get from folks meaning, like, prying into your adoption things.
Often when I talk to people that are in the public eye, they're always getting questions like, yeah, what did your adoptive family think of that? Or, those kinds of things. And it feels so obtuse cuz it's what about me? It's my thing. Ask me about me. Have you noticed any shift in the conversation over 10 years?
Mary Gauthier: Not really. I don't think so. I think discussion discussions around adoption and trauma are nuclear, and I think people will go outta their way to avoid them. When we talk, and I talked about my book for months with the press, we never went there. We never went to those chapters. We worked our way around it.
They wanted to hear more about my work with the military. Around PTSD and trauma that happens during wartime. They wanted to hear more about my recovery from addiction, using music and songs to help me to stay clean and sober. I'm in my 32nd year of recovery. They wanted to hear about the songwriting process, but we just leapfrogged right over the whole primal wound. That is the genesis of all the work that I do, and I didn't need to talk about it. The, I think it makes people uncomfortable. I think it's very hard for people and they know they're likely to say something stupid because they don't understand, and so they don't wanna do that.
They don't wanna step in it. I, I've had so many people in the triad say things that were just kinda insensitive or just ignorant or un unschooled. Everybody feels like an orphan. Is that right? That's good to know. Like we're gonna argue with that, but that's unschooled.
Haley: Yes.
Mary Gauthier: That's the lack of curiosity around what an adoptee actually feels. Yeah.
Haley: I you shared your book that you've worked with veterans and helping them sing songs. And again, your sobriety and I'm curious. Who are the people that you feel most connected with when you're writing songs? Cuz listing off those communities. We all come from a place of some sort of traumatic incident and yeah. What are your thoughts around that? Do you get different feelings when you're working with different people?
Mary Gauthier: The work I did with veterans was very specific, was part of an organization. A program that paired professional songwriters with wounded veterans. So that, that I was dropped into that community and really loved it. I enjoyed that work very much. I did it for 10 years. And then life changed and the organization changed and I moved on. I've written with healthcare workers during the height of the pandemic who were also, were highly traumatized.
They went from being heroes to being feared because they could be carrying this deadly virus. And there's different types of songwriting. When I write generally I'm trying to just write from my own observation of the world and my own emotion. But when I'm paired with other folks through any number of reasons I do resonate as a songwriter with people who have story and people with trauma have story. And it's untold story, which is rich.
Rich, rich to be mined by a songwriter. There's very few people who don't have some kind of deep trauma. There. There's just such a long list. I would argue it's probably traumatic just being a woman in our culture. The things that women have to endure are astronomical.
And it's pretty much unavoidable. There's just medical trauma and the pandemic was traumatic for so many people. The sudden loss of elders in their family who were perfectly healthy and then dead. There, there was just so much uncertainty. I imagine that the question is unanswerable because there's so much to write about always if you're looking for truth. If you're looking to write something that says something,
Haley: You shared in your book this line about Mercy Now being one of the top 20 songs from Rolling Stone Sad songs. Yeah. And you say it's not sad, it's real.
Mary Gauthier: Yeah.
Haley: And I think that's why people connect so much with your work is that vulnerability in the real, bringing that story to, to bear. And how have you seen this for adopted people? So you share that real in The Foundling and in your memoir, what do you call your book? I feel like it's so much memoir. I know it's about songwriting too.
Mary Gauthier: It's memoir and a sort of a I think it's an instructional guide for songwriters and also I think a discussion of how to alchemize trauma.
How to alchemize things that are trying to pull you under. Through art and in my, my life. It's been songwriting. Yeah. But yeah. Yeah. Rolling Stone named it one of the 20 saddest songs of all time, and they missed it. It's not a sad song. I think that we live in escapist culture, and if music and art is not escapist, then they call it sad.
They got two settings, escapist or sad and. Yeah, that's just a lack of imagination. If it makes you feel something, a variety of some things I think that's great art and you're supposed to experience emotion, and if you cry, it doesn't mean you're sad. It means something really touched you.
It's almost a cultural fear of tears and emotion. Because sad is bad, but not all tears are around sorrow and sadness and grief and loss. I've cried at staring at a Van Gogh in person. His self-portrait. It's just so moving. And it wasn't because I was sad. It was because it was beautiful and so yeah.
I think when we talk honestly and openly about our life as adoptees, people are gonna inherently characterize it as sad, but sads only one of the experiences. The one of the other really I think important things to discuss is how resilient we are and just how amazing human beings can be in, in that department to create a world that we can survive through our imagination and then have to dismantle it and get to reality somehow. So that we can survive again and again. And that there's something about that's hopeful. Very hopeful that hope is a part of it. You know that we need hope and I think hope can come from rewriting the story over and over again.
Haley: I think that is one of the critiques of folks in our community who are talking about that adoption is trauma and it comes across sometimes as like sharing from a place of like victimization cuz we didn't have any choice in it. And I think when you talked about in your book about, going to treatment for codependency and learning that you were abandoning yourself.
Mary Gauthier: Yeah.
Haley: And you had to kinda show up for yourself. Can you talk a little bit through that? Cuz that's oh that's a, that could sound like easy. Oh, that's to the place I need to get. But that is a huge leap to go from, I'm abandoning myself and what happened to me to, okay, now I'm gonna choose myself.
Mary Gauthier: It's so hard. And it's so much work. It's so much work until we become conscious of what we're doing. I should keep this in first person because we're all so different too. Everyone's experience is so unique, but for me, until I became conscious of what I was doing, I couldn't stop doing it. And I was just reenacting abandonment.
Unconsciously. I expected to be abandoned, so I behaved accordingly, and I had to bring that to the surface that this is what I'm expecting. And that's a lie. I'm telling myself a lie. I don't need to expect to be abandoned. You know what, how do I rewrite that story? And as, as far as the community at large talking about this, and being criticized, whenever you tell the truth about anything, you're gonna get criticized.
Have at it, critics. There is more power in telling the truth than in being a critic, because when you speak truth, you help others and you you model courage so that others might be brave. The critics just create fear. They're not doing anything particularly useful. And so I say speak up and know that the critics are always waiting to criticize.
It's what they do. They don't get to define us. We do.
Haley: Can you talk a little bit about the importance of really digging down when you need mental health supports. I try very hard to normalize going to therapy and we talk so much about that here because there's so many things we can learn from listening to shows or reading books and reading self-help books and things, but often that's still looking outward and it's really hard to look inward just with yourself with no supports, especially for a wound like the primal wound.
Mary Gauthier: Oh gosh. I've been in recovery and I go to 12 step meetings and I've been doing that for 32 years and I probably, hopefully always will. I need support. I need support around my addiction. I need support in my recovery. I do therapy and I've done therapy for a very long time. I've done very many things and will continue to do very many things to disassemble the wound, I don't want it to kill me. I want to not only not die from the wound, I want to thrive.
I want to experience my full potential as a human being. I don't wanna be held back by what happened to me at birth. And look we're not in a level playing field with everybody. When you have that severing at birth, you're gonna have to deal with a different reality emotionally and spiritually.
And knowing what that is, is helpful. Naming it, identifying it, and seeing how it makes decisions for me, allows me to then make different decisions. My, my belief systems were formed by this, and I've had to rebuild this stuff. It's not an overnight thing. It's decades at work.
There's joy in the work too. And there's joy in finding people who genuinely help us or let me get it back to first person. I've experienced joy in finding beautiful people who have truly helped me. There is so much meaning in the work and I'm at peace with doing, I call it work. It's not even work. Yeah. I'm at peace with actively healing.
Haley: That's so wise. That's so good. You mentioned at the start of your story even at the time of your adoption, there was parents that weren't even telling their kids they were adopted, which still happens to this day. It's rare, more rare, but it still is happening shockingly. But now there are more and more studies coming out about us as adopted people, and one of the really staggering stats is that we're two times more likely to be diagnosed with a substance use disorder and what are you seeing anything in, in having more information accessible like this?
Like I know in, in your story you share that you were abusing alcohol in your teens and there was a tumultuous home life as well and lots of hard things happening for you. But do you see any movement in that. If we have more research to show that, and for parents to be on the lookout and knowing that adoption is trauma. I don't know. I'm looking for some hope for the younger generations that they won't be so in the dark as we were.
Mary Gauthier: Just speaking what you spoke when I started talking this way, the only people talking this way were Betty Jean Lifton and a handful of others. And I think it's pretty common knowledge now that the primary cause of addiction is trauma.
I think that the experts in trauma have articulated that from Gabor Maté to Dr. Bessel Van der Kolk. Addiction is caused primarily by trauma. That it's it's not a hundred percent always caused by trauma. There's a genetic component, but it's understood by by mental health experts that when you have trauma, it creates this pain that chemical substances can relieve for a little while.
So if it's understood that there is a primal wound in the separation from the birth family, that is a deep trauma, then I would imagine that more and more people understand that you're at risk for addiction. And you're, my ACEs scores, there were no ACEs scores when I was a kid, but if there were, mine would've been through the roof.
I'd have burned the test down. I was ripe for the trouble I got in and so was my adoptive brother. And we just, absolutely. A Hollywood version did exactly what would be expected with the trauma that we carried. And intervention, I think is, I think hope is real. When you are aware of a vulnerability, you address it, you discuss it, you say, you know this is what's going on, and here's what could be.
We have to be careful around this. We need to talk about this. And I think the light, letting the light in speaking, honestly about it can avert some of the worst of it. If we stay in the dark and pretend it's not happening, nothing's ever gonna change.
Shows like yours and so many books are being written now that, that speak these truths. Mine included. And there's just a vast amount of truth telling going on, which I think is transformative.
Haley: Yeah. The more of us that speak up, it does lend that courage as you were mentioning earlier. Okay. Let's talk about the joy. I love that you started songwriting a little bit later on, like that was a discovery for you later.
Can you tell us about what it's like to find out who you really are later on? I think so many of us adoptees struggle with identity issues in particular cuz we're in a family that are strangers and where's our mother. But that is just a piece of your story. I just love I love when people come into who they're supposed to be, yeah.
Mary Gauthier: Yeah. I I was in the restaurant business. I got arrested for drunk driving. I got sober. And next thing I'm at a open mic with one of my waitresses and she plays an original song and light bulb screws in, and I just saw it. I wanted to do that. And so I've always had a guitar banging around, played cover songs and, I re- strung it and got some callouses built up and I started writing songs.
And I moved to Nashville when I was 40. I live in Nashville now. So I've been here 21 years. I I really didn't know I was a songwriter until after I got sober. And I, even then I had to become a songwriter. But it felt right and it felt true and it it still does. I think the restaurant business was a bit of a placeholder for me as I got stable, as I, it helped me stable stabilize after I got sober and then leap frog into becoming a an author and a songwriter and a teacher.
I teach songwriting all the time and I work with adults who are trying to articulate hard things.
Haley: What's it like to be on stage? And I have a friend who is absolutely obsessed with you. I know she's come to a show and she got to meet you and you signed her book and her copy of your book and. What's it like to perform and then sometimes get to connect with adopted people.
Mary Gauthier: It's fantastic. It's awesome. It's really beautiful to, to meet the Kindred folk. It's there's just an understanding. We understand. We understand, there's so much we don't have to say we get it. We know. And that this intensifies also as you get older, because it is a it's a lonely experience.
If you don't have these type of connections with other adoptees who get it. Because it is, there's no explaining this fully. It's too much. Any trauma cannot be explained fully. You can explain aspects of it, but in its entirety, it's too big. You can't submerge somebody into this experience who hasn't experienced it. It's just not gonna happen.
Haley: I'm imagining that you get emails and letters and correspondence from. All members of the adoption constellation, and I have people send me very hard stories and it can feel overwhelming sometimes because you're, you become a carrier of their pain. How have you managed to do that? And I, I think, I don't know, you seem just like a very empathetic person and that you're really good at walking alongside people in that. But at your level, it's just not possible to do that for everyone. So how are you able to manage those feelings?
Mary Gauthier: Yeah. I do receive a lot of a lot of stories, a lot of. Because I tell mine people want, wanna tell me theirs. And I think for me, I acknowledge their experience. And I think the thing that matters is, there's an acknowledgement. They're not asking me to fix 'em or anything. They know that nobody can fix it. It's work that has to be done, but to just say, I see you and your story matters.
Thank you for honoring me with it. I don't overthink it anymore. I don't try to carry it along with me or take it as a burden that I need to add to the pile or anything. I think a simple acknowledgement and follow it up with your story does matter. Everyone's stories matter. People tell their stories cuz they're asking does it matter?
And it does matter. And we tell it looking to connect and looking for I think resonance. And when stories resonate I let people know they resonate. And then I move on out of necessity. And it's what you do. You don't stay stuck in someone's story. You move on and, but you have to, honestly, it's a, it's about respect. Really taking it in, really seeing it, and then releasing it.
I think that's the only thing you can do.
Haley: So you shared in the book that you grew up with so you were the first child that your parents adopted and then they adopted a brother and then they had a biological daughter. So you grew up with a fellow adoptee. Did you ever talk about being adopted?
And I asked you earlier about sort of your family and you said they didn't really engage with your art. How about your brother?
Mary Gauthier: Nope. He sees it as a betrayal of my adoptive parents to talk about adoption, and so I honor that. I used to see it that way too when I was a young person. He's never grown out of that.
I think he's afraid that if he acknowledges the amount of his pain, and I'm just reading this into him, that he could lose the two parents that he had. My father's passed on, but my mom's 86, she's still alive. He, my brother sees her almost every day and he wouldn't, I don't think ever talk about his adoption wounds or anything like that while she's still alive. and I don't think she wants him too. I don't think she wants me to, but my brother and I are different. I don't see it as a betrayal. I see it as self-preservation. I can do it in a loving and respectful way, but I have to do it.
Haley: I also was rejected by my biological mother, so I had a four month reunion with her and then she cut off contact, and that was in my very early twenties and it took me, I think about eight years before I looked for my father.
And we have a really great relationship now over 10 years. Have you ever searched or wanted to know, or was the door closing with your mother? Just that was it.
Mary Gauthier: I would love to know. I asked her, but she won't tell me. And she is adamant about that. She won't tell me, and there's no genetic testing that gets us the paternal side as women.
So it's in her, she, it's up to her and she won't, and I'm not gonna, I'm just gonna have to let it go. Yeah. Unless genetics figures out a way to get the paternal side for a woman, I just won't know. And, at this stage, he's probably deceased. I would like to know if I have siblings on my paternal side but it might not be something I ever know and I can't, I can't make, and I got my original birth certificate when they opened it up in Louisiana last year, and it does not have the paternal side on it.
So that's that. I don't think I am gonna know.
Haley: Yeah, there is, there's a lot of movement forward in dna, so who knows? Maybe someday you'll have some answers. I really appreciate you digging into so many of those deeply personal things with us and for, I don't know if you see it this way, but a lot of us look up to you as a leader in the adoptee community for the things that you've shared.
So I absolutely want people to, if they haven't yet, to listen to your music. And if you need a good cry, you need to really get in your feelings, and journal. The Foundling is the place to do that. But look at all the tabs I have in your book, Mary.
Mary Gauthier: Thank you.
Haley: Yes, it is so insightful and thoughtful, and I think this would be a great book to share with non-adopted people in your life because it has part of your story in it, but as you mentioned it, it's talking to trauma survivors and just people that wanna process story and it's so amazing. I listen to it as well, which is like such a huge gift cuz it's from your voice and you have some of your songs on there. Even songs you wrote in process and you sing it. Oh my gosh. Like amazing. Like 10 outta 10.
Mary Gauthier: Oh, thank you. Thank you.
Haley: Yeah. So for people who wanna start the conversation about adoption with people that aren't adopting their lives, I think this be a great sort of entry into that. What do you wanna recommend to folks?
Mary Gauthier: I'd say build your understanding on the classics of our literature. I think Journey of the Adopted itself is a must read. The Betty Jean Lifton book and the follow up. I have 'em right there on my counter. Right there. I reference Betty Jean a lot. And she wrote another book about a polish doctor named Corsak who marched orphans out of the orphanage during World War II.
And the story, I will not give it away, but it's incredibly moving. Betty Jean is one of my favorite writers around this stuff. I think get the foundation. And I read over 60 books when I was writing The Foundling. I read everything out there in our literature at the time, there wasn't a lot. Nothing surpassed BJ and and Nancy Verrier.
They added to it. But those are foundational for me. And. I couldn't recommend them. More they gave me a language to my own experience that I didn't have before I read it. That's truly foundational. That would be my suggestion.
Haley: Wonderful. And the other thing I love that you shared earlier was being in community with fellow adoptees because
Mary Gauthier: Yes.
Haley: We're the ones that get it.
Mary Gauthier: Yeah. We don't have to explain it to each other. We get it.
Haley: I love how you've cultivated community and on your YouTube channel through part of the pandemic you had Sundays with Mary. Yeah. Just so special, like a place for people to come live and hear you. And so anyway, if people need some comfort as well, they could check that out on your YouTube channel.
But when we're recording this early 2023, you are on tour so people can come and see you.
Mary Gauthier: Yeah. I'm always adding tour dates. I'm really a troubador at heart. I go from town to town and play music and tell stories and I I tend to be very on the go. I love my job.
I love my work and it does take me around the world. Just hop onto my website if you're interested in catching the show. I play relatively small venues, usually under 300 people. And it's a very conversational show. It's an ancient art. I'm a troubador. I'm a storyteller at heart.
And so I tell stories in between the songs, which also tell stories. And what I'm motivated to do is create connection. Resonance. I think resonance is very important, especially for adoptees. We desperately need resonance.
Haley: Yes. Thank you. It has just been an absolute honor. Thank you so much for sharing some of your story and wisdom with us, and I know that it'll be very exciting for some, maybe of my younger listeners who haven't gotten into Mary's work yet to dive into some of your albums, which there are many available, so amazing.
Mary Gauthier: Yeah. Thank you for what you do. Thanks for articulating this for the next generation of folks that have to deal with it. Thank you. Thank you.
Haley: Thank you so much, Mary.
Oh my goodness. Mary is amazing. And if you've ever had a chance to see her perform live, I would love to hear about a common comment on the Instagram. Post about this show and share what it was like to hear her perform. Her book Saved by a Song- it just, it's truly so wonderful. It's an amazing, listen, I already said on Audible, but I think we're gonna be reading it later this year for our book club.
So if you're interested in reading more adoptee authored work, come on over. AdopteesOn.com/BookClub has a list of our book picks this year. And if you're a patron, you have access to the Live Zoom recordings, and then we always release the audio afterwards so you can hear if you're not able to join us live.
The other fun thing about Book Club is it's really a community experience. So we usually have an hour discussion about the book, but then afterwards when we're not recording, we hang out and just talk about the book and adoptee related things. So this if you're listening when this goes live, the book we're reading right now is Invisible Boy by Harrison.
And we're gonna be joined by him on May 6th for our live Zoom book club. So if you wanna join us, adopteeson.com/bookclub has details of how to become a Patreon supporter. We would love to have you, and thank you so much for listening. Let's talk again next Friday.
