Joyce wadler biography

Liaison: the Gripping Real Story of the Diplomat Spy and the Chinese Opera Star

July 22, 2024
Liaison by Joyce Wadler.

In 1982, French diplomat Bernard Boursicot was arrested for passing intelligence information from his embassy in Beijing to Chinese opera singer Pei Pu. Boursicot claimed that he had spied to protect Pei Pu from punishment by the Chinese government when it was discovered that Pei Pu was his lover and the mother of his son. But investigation revealed that Pei Pu was in fact a man. Claiming an adopted child as his and Boursicot’ s, Pei Pu had successfully deceived Boursicot, in and out of bed, for 18 years. Wadler has written a vivid account of this bizarre story, drawing on interviews with Boursicot, Pei Pu and more than 100 of their friends and colleagues. Boursicot, a bisexual who has admitted to scores of love affairs, and Pei Pu have both served time in prison for espionage. And while their duplicitous lives are richly detailed here, their true natures remain a mystery.

High-class retelling of the real-life affair behind the mistaken-sex plot of M. Butter

Joyce Wadler

American journalist, memoirist and reporter

Joyce Wadler

Wadler in 2009

Born

Joyce Judith Wadler


(1948-01-02) January 2, 1948 (age 77)
Occupation(s)Journalist, reporter
EmployerThe New York Times

Joyce Judith Wadler (born January 2, 1948) is a journalist and reporter for The New York Times, as well as a writer and humorist.

Career

Prior to working at the New York Times, she was a reporter and feature writer for the New York Post, New York correspondent for The Washington Post and a contributing editor for New York Magazine and Rolling Stone. She authored Liaison: The True Story of the M. Butterfly Affair (ISBN 0-553-09213-8) after interviewing Bernard Boursicot, who granted her wide access to information and insight into his affair with Shi Pei Pu. [citation needed]

Cancer

Wadler has been treated for both breast and ovarian cancer. In 1991, Wadler was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a malignant tumor "the size of a robin's egg" removed from her left breast.[1]

Joyce Wadler is a New York City humorist and journalist who wrote the award-winning “I Was Misinformed” column for The New York Times and was for 15 years a Times staff reporter.
Before joining the Times, Wadler was a newspaper and magazine feature writer, crime reporter and author. She was the first woman to be the New York correspondent for The Washington Post, a contributing editor for New York Magazine and Rolling Stone, a staff writer at People Magazine and The Daily News Magazine and a reporter at Dorothy Schiff’s New York Post. Her books include her memoir, “My Breast,” which the London Sunday Times praised as a darkly funny book about breast cancer and which she later adapted as a CBS television movie and "Cured: One Woman's Ovarian Cancer Story". She is also the author of “Liaison,” the true story of the French civil servant and the Chinese opera singer which inspired the play “M. Butterfly.”
She holds the 2018 National Society of Newspaper Columnists First Place Award for Humor and the 2018 Silurian Award for Commentary/ Editorial, The New York Press Club Award for

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