But fat was still a touchy subject; writers posited a woman who is obese only because of a twist of fate: a slim, bubbleheaded blonde dies and comes back to life switched into the physique of a smart, Rubenesque lawyer.
Readers thought Sharpe perhaps a one-subject writer, but with Porterhouse Blue (1974), set in a Cambridge college, he proved that he was a true comic novelist in the great English tradition.
Her work as both a poet and scholar is based largely on making emotionally plausible connections between subjects, writers -- even entire epochs -- that seem as if they couldn't possibly inform one another.
His essays and prefaces, more often than not written quickly to order, were the fruits of his regular meditations and reveal his interest in a remarkably wide variety of subjects: writers and writing, philosophers and language, painters, dancing, architecture, and the fine arts are all reexamined with refreshing vigour.
Turning to the subject of writer's block, he was quick to dismiss it as "a kind of American cult … a constructed sickness".
All Bennett Miller is asking you to be aware of is the transactions: between patron and performer, between subject and writer and ultimately, between film-maker and viewer.
Gay love in Uganda is the subject of writer Chris Urch's The Rolling Stone, directed by Ellen McDougall, in the Royal Exchange studio in Manchester.
Part of the problem, I think, is that the bond that developed between subject and writer made it nearly impossible for Isaacson to get the kind of critical distance he needed to take his subject's true measure.
But there's one subject the writer has been considerably mum on: the story behind her path to motherhood.
