And her life has provided her more material than she could write in a thousand songs.  Adopted at the age of one, Gauthier was raised by parents who, she points out, were captives of a doomed marriage.  Her adoptive father was an alcoholic, and her adoptive mother cried all the time, so there was constant pandemonium and chaos surrounding the family.

Also doomed was any chance this life-long outsider had of fitting into a conventional world.  So alienated did she feel from her family, her neighbors and peers, that she seldom went to school.  Only the songs of Bob Dylan, John Prine, Jim Morrison, Patti Smith, Neil Young and other "truth tellers" spoke to her tortured soul.   The family car represented her only means of escape, so she stole the car when she was 15. "I had no idea where I was going," she remembers.  "I just knew if I stayed, my life would be in danger—not that somebody was going to kill me, but I felt like I was dying."

The years that followed were tumultuous at best, thanks to her own problems with alcohol and drugs.  The decade between 15 and 25 included two stints in detox, two stints in halfway houses, living with her mother again for a week, running away again and living with friends, a too-old young woman with no address and no direction.  She spent her 18^th birthday in a Kansas jail for stealing pills from a car.  Upon her release, she was "invited" to leave the state, and she just kept running, eventually landing in Baton Rouge again. 

She found a waitressing job near the campus of LSU, and with assistance from the state of Louisiana and the restaurant owner, she enrolled in LSU as a philosophy major.  College provided further germination for the writing seeds in her mind.  "The most important thing I got from philosophy was that there are no answers," she says.  "There are only good questions.  There's freedom in knowing that you don't have to k now it all, which is why, to me, a song should end with a question, not an answer."

Her demonic drug addiction caused her to leave school in her senior year and move to Boston, where she endured a series of crappy jobs before ending up behind the counter at a little café.  Although still in the throes of her drug habit, Gauthier managed to garner a promotion to manager of the café.  With the help of financial backers, she was able to enroll in the Cambridge School of Culinary Arts.  Upon completion, she opened a Cajun restaurant, Dixie Kitchen, in the Back Bay area of Boston.  The restaurant allowed her fertile mind to create more than imaginative dishes.  "For me, the best part of the gig was the creative part – writing the menu, rewriting the menu, figuring out how the place would look," she explained. 

The maintenance part, however, drained her creative juices, so once again she resorted to habit, running away, only this time with a direction in mind – to get sober.  It worked.  With sobriety came a new spurt of creativity, and Mary found herself writing songs for the first time.  "It was like, bam, two neurons touched, fused, connected, and the next thing you know, I'm obsessed with getting words down in a song to make sense of all this, to try and understand my own life."  At the age of 35, a new life began.

The early songs were, by her own admission, derivative.  Because her mission was to find truth through writing, the next ones came out shaper, less mannered, more painful and redemptive.  "I hit my stride when I wrote this song called ‘Goddamn HIV,'" she says.  "It's written from the perspective of a gay man who's got the virus.  That's when I realized that something has to happen when I write – a physiological reaction.  If it raises the hair on my arms and puts goose bumps there, I know I've nailed it."

Armed with a collection of her self-penned songs, Mary picked up a guitar and headed out to perform them at local coffeehouses.  She also compiled her songs on a CD she titled after her restaurant, Dixie Kitchen, which was released in 1997 and earned her a Boston Music Award nomination for Best New Contemporary Folk Artist – a coup for any first-time performer in the city's hyper-competitive market.  "That gave me some confidence.  I really started writing hard and strong.  I spent less and less time at the restaurant, and more and more time writing at my desk."

She also gravitated to Nashville and began doing workshops under the auspices of the Nashville Songwriters Association.  "I was passionate about songs the way I once was about soup," she laughs.  She sold her share in the restaurant to finance her second album, Drag Queens in Limousines, released in 1999 to astounding critical acclaim, including a four-star review in Rolling Stone.   A third independent album, Filth & Fire, followed in 2002 and solidified her growing reputation as one of the top American roots singer/songwriters.  Her fourth album, Mercy Now, however, found her recording for a major label, Nashville's Lost Highway, and signed to the publishing company founded by the Dean of Nashville Songwriters, the late Harlan Howard. 

Prior to signing with Harlan Howard Songs, Mary sent out more than 60 letters to Nashville publishers hoping to find a like-minded publisher, but she always felt the company founded by one of Nashville's greatest songwriters was her home.  "Harlan was the last great writer of smokin', drinkin', cheatin', can't-ever-win-big, but broken-hearted looser songs.  I thought my songs would be understood at his publishing company, and I deeply doubted they would be understood anywhere else in Nashville," she concluded.