Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Sleeping with Leeches: A Memoir of Power, Seduction, and Two Years in the Borneo Forest

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

Holmsen, Katherine

Paperback

Biographies GeneralAnthropologyGeneral Parenting

Publisher Price: $18.99

PREORDER - Expected ship date January 19, 2027

ISBN13: 9798896362067
Publisher: She Writes Press
Published: Jan 19 2027
Pages: 256
Weight: 0.46
Language: English
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.

Also in

Biographies General

View All