Sleeping with Leeches: A Memoir of Power, Seduction, and Two Years in the Borneo Forest

For readers of Cheryl Strayed and Alexandra Fuller, this contemporary memoir—unfolding across Arizona, Bali, and the wilds of Borneo—traces a thirtysomething grad student’s emotional and sexual entanglement with her renowned PhD advisor.

In her mid-thirties, after a tumultuous early adulthood, Katherine Holmsen jumps into a doctoral program in anthropology to finally get her life together—and somehow finds herself alone in the mountainous tropics of Indonesia, beginning fieldwork with a remote tribe of rainforest hunter-gatherers. There among the Punan of Borneo, she bathes in crocodile-infested rivers, joins shamanic healing rituals, and runs barefoot through the forest after her research subjects, all as she reckons with how she lost herself in relation to the man she once believed would transform her life.

A gripping memoir that blends raw adventure with emotional vulnerability, Sleeping with Leeches traces how Katherine got to Borneo—recounting her brilliant, narcissistic mentor’s almost imperceptible pursuit during her early coursework in Tucson, her unwitting decision to follow him across the globe, and their charged encounter at a vibrant Balinese temple ceremony, where his intentions finally become unmistakably clear. Told with an ethnographer’s eye and flashes of dark humor, Sleeping with Leeches offers both an insider’s view of academia and a sharp critique of the unspoken cultural rules that entrap women—while also exploring the subtle and potentially dangerous fusion of intellect and desire.