Noel Parmentel Jr., who died in August 2024 at 98, was eulogized as Joan Didion’s mentor. What’s not well known is that they lived together as a couple and their breakup occasioned her essay ...

Culture / Noel Parmentel was, according to his former lover and mentee, Joan Didion, the ‘outsider who lived by his ability to manipulate the inside.’ Richard Lingeman There was a time when ...

Discovering Joan Brown, a San Francisco Star Joan Brown, Noel in the Kitchen, c. 1964. (Bequest of Dale C. Crichton) ...

Noel tried to get her into “the paper,” as Robert Silvers called it, as either a subject or an author, shortly after her first novel, Run River, appeared in 1963.