Wyoming Author With Tourette Syndrome Finds Voice By Writing Characters With It

The countess was in trouble.

It was the early 1800s in France and her uncontrolled twitching had just taken on a new malady. She was cursing and this was completely unbecoming of a noblewoman.

For her entire life, she had looked for an explanation for her strange tics , and it finally came — one year after she died in 1884.

The countess had Tourette’s syndrome and, more than a century later, Jessica Baehr, an author in Lander, Wyoming, saw this French woman as a kindred spirit.

Baehr wanted to bring the noblewoman’s story back to life, and since there wasn’t enough information about the “cursed countess,” Baehr turned to fiction to tell the story, and the result was “Madame,” released this past September.

Baehr had originally discovered a nine-page document about the counte