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Noel Parmentel Jr., the Man Joan Didion Left Behind


When she said good-bye to all that.

He had yet to speak on the record about it, and since he was both a friend of mine and very private about her, I decided to quote a roommate of Didion’s who called Noel “her éminence grise, her taskmaster.” For the rest, people would have to read between the lines. Spy soon folded, but Noel kept in touch, inviting me to the novelist Robert Stone’s place on the millpond in Westport, where he sometimes house-sat, and to his home in Fairfield, Connecticut, where he lived with Vivian Sorvall and her two children. This summer, not long before he was hospitalized for the final time, he heard the news of the prisoner exchange with Russia that brought home Evan Gershkovich, Alsu Kurmasheva, and Paul Whelan.

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