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 remo...