Sydney, 1972, and a troupe called Sylvia and the Synthetics is doing something to an audience that has no word for it yet. That is where this audiobook picks its subject up, a few years ahead of the move to San Francisco and a very long way ahead of any mainstream audience for what he was making. Craig Seligman's biography of Doris Fish runs ten hours and twenty-nine minutes, published by PublicAffairs in February 2023 and read by Mela Lee, and its ambitions run well past one performer's life story.
The bluntest sentence in the copy is also its most useful, and what it counts is three separate Dorises. The quiet visual artist, the glorious drag queen, and the hunky male prostitute whose earnings paid for the other two. That is the organizing idea and it does genuine work, because it explains how the book can move between an art practice, a stage career and a working life without any of the three reading as a digression. Born Philip Mills in 1952. A life the copy describes as short but overstuffed, which turns out to be exact.
A note about language before you buy, since the book makes a choice and keeps to it. The description uses he and his for Doris throughout, painted and padded his way to stardom, he was a leader, he started performing, while the title on the cover asks who that bitch thinks she is. That tension is the subject rather than a slip: a period in which the pronoun and the persona were doing different jobs, and in which putting the word bitch on a poster was a claim about who was allowed to be looked at. Arrive with current vocabulary and expect to meet an older one.
Mela Lee is the one voice credited, and the assignment has a particular shape. The copy describes a book filled with interviews and letters, which makes the finished text a chorus: friends, collaborators, the people the author went back to in order to rebuild a scene. All of them reach you through a single reader. That is a legitimate production decision and it is also the thing worth testing in a sample, because a book built out of quotation asks its reader to mark where one speaker stops and the next begins without impersonating anybody.
In Danger of Being Forgotten Entirely
The strongest case for it here belongs to a response reading the book as a record of a place rather than of a person. What it singles out is the evocation of 1980s San Francisco and the first years of the AIDS crisis as it moved through the gay community, all of it arriving inside a book nominally about one drag artist. The same response uses the phrase in danger of being forgotten, which is the real argument for the entire project, because this is not a name that survived on its own.
Seligman's thesis is sharper than a rescue mission, though. The copy claims the San Francisco shows were loved the way you love throwaway trash, that the participants themselves never understood them as political theater, and that they were accomplishing satire's deepest dream regardless: not railing against a society but altering it. One reader tests that claim in the most useful way available, noting that the book quotes both Susan Sontag and Lulu, that it delivers drag cleavage and intellectual heft in the same volume, that it is meticulously researched, and that it took years to finish. Holding all of that together is difficult, and the argument requires exactly that.
The scale of the work shows through the copy as well: revisiting places and people, building from letters and interviews, treating a scene that documented itself badly as something recoverable. Ten and a half hours is generous for one performer and about right for a book that also has to carry Sydney, San Francisco, the shift from openly despised to publicly celebrated, and the specific texture of shows that seemed at the time not worth preserving.
A Reference List Problem for Every Listener
One problem here belongs specifically to the audio. A four-star assessment admits to losing track of who was who, and says plainly that the Recurring Names section at the front of the book is what solved it. That section is a reference list. In print you flip back whenever a name surfaces that you only half remember. A recording gives you nothing to flip back to, and this listing mentions nothing bundled alongside the file, so the tool that reader leaned on does not come with the format you are considering.
What that costs depends on the size of the cast, and the cast is large by design. A scene rebuilt from interviews fills up with people who appear once, vanish for two hours, then return inside somebody else's anecdote. The copy alone names a Sydney troupe, a San Francisco circuit and the collaborators around both. The practical fix is to keep a note open on your phone for the first two hours, which sounds ridiculous for a book about drag queens and is genuinely the difference between following it and drifting through it.
Buy the Printed Edition If You Need the List
Recommend it hard to anybody who wants queer history as lived texture rather than as a timeline. A reader who got through it in three days describes finishing attached to the whole cast rather than to Doris alone, and names drag scenes on two continents as the thing learned along the way. That is the experience on offer: an era rebuilt through the people who made it, with the sequins and the funerals in the same chapter. Add listeners who follow drag now and want to know what it cost before television arrived.
A tidy chronological life story is not what waits here, so readers who want a biography moving steadily in one direction will find this one doubling back on itself constantly. The same applies to anyone uncomfortable with sex work described plainly, since the copy names it as one of the three lives and the book declines to treat it as a shameful footnote. If a reference list is what will save you, buy the printed edition. If not, this is a rich and serious ten and a half hours.
Before You Press Play
- Performance: Mela Lee is the sole credited reader, on a book whose title alone makes it awkward to ask for out loud at a library desk.
- What it covers: Drag history from Stonewall to AIDS, one performer living three separate lives, the Sydney and San Francisco queer scenes, satire that changed something.
- Feel: Dishy and scholarly at once, very funny until it is not.
- Our call: Valuable queer cultural history, though the printed edition holds a name list this format cannot hand you.
How long is the Who Does That Bitch Think She Is? audiobook and who reads it?
The recording runs ten hours and twenty-nine minutes with Mela Lee as the sole credited reader, released by PublicAffairs in February 2023. That runtime covers a life beginning in Sydney in 1972 and a scene stretching from the post-Stonewall years through the arrival of AIDS, so the pace stays unhurried.
Is the Recurring Names list from the printed edition part of the audiobook?
Nothing is listed as coming with the recording, so plan on audio alone. That matters because the book carries a large cast reconstructed from interviews and letters. Keeping your own short list of names through the first couple of hours is the workaround most listeners end up improvising for themselves.
Why does the description use he and his for Doris Fish?
Because the book sits in a period that used those words, and the copy follows its subject's own era rather than retrofitting current usage onto it. Doris Fish was born Philip Mills in 1952 and built a persona that ran alongside that name rather than replacing it. The title's she is the persona speaking.
Is this the biography of one person or a history of drag?
Both, deliberately. The copy frames Doris Fish as the route into a larger question about how drag traveled from something the public feared to something television now celebrates. You get a life, a Sydney troupe, a San Francisco circuit and an argument about satire, which is a lot of freight for one subject.
