Growing up is never easy
and never ends…
Trey Hollinswood, 15, and his thirteen-year-old sister Kim are dealing with a lot: Their parents separate; the bank forecloses on their home; they stay with their mom in a homeless shelter and then in the home of a customer, Walt, she meets at work. The atmosphere at Walt’s is tense and life for Trey and Kim is made more difficult because they’re forced to share a bedroom. Like all young people, they have issues; Trey his burgeoning sex drive and Kim the fact that she has no interest in acting or looking girlish and is sometimes mistaken for a boy. They struggle to grow up and, in the process, learn about love and the importance of friendship; Trey with Julie, Walt’s seventeen-year-old daughter, and Emily, a cotillion partner; and Kim with Cyd, a girl she meets in her soccer league. Their coming-of-age stories are two of many stories about people of all ages dealing with life and relationships in Southern California during the Great Recession.
“Dave Gioia’s provocative second novel, Himba Pond Dance, follows naturally on the heels of his debut, Valley of Saint Anne. In both books, Gioia considers mature themes in a frank voice and focuses on the thoughts and feelings of young teenagers exploring their sexuality…Himba Pond Dance offers a refreshingly honest look at relationships and some surprising insights into the teenage mind”
“I absolutely loved this book. It’s a wonderful story about learning to trust and opening your heart and your mind to new things. This book made me cry. I fell in love with these characters. My favorites were definitely Kim and Cyd and Trey. I could definitely relate to this book in a lot of different ways. I’ve been homeless, I’ve had girlfriends, I’ve been a cutter since I was 13, I’ve been abused and cheated on. I know how these characters feel so I absolutely love this book. When I was reading this, I was living their pain and rejoicing when they did. I would recommend this book to anybody because everybody can relate to this book in one way or another.”
“This is a beautifully woven collection of characters whose stories come together as they experience personal transformation. I read this on my iPhone, which meant constant pinching and scrolling, but I couldn’t put it down!”
FROM THE AUTHOR
Thoughts about Himba Pond Dance…
If you’re like most people in the U.S., or the Western world for that matter, you didn’t escape the effects of the financial crisis of 2008 and ensuing market meltdown and decline in the value of investments and real estate and loss of savings.
My primary purpose in writing Himba Pond Dance was to examine life in a typical middle-class family in Southern California hit hard by the financial crisis and struggling to get by during the Great Recession. The story soon developed into one about relationships between people of all ages and differing ages, which isn’t surprising since my interest in relationships is endless. They are the glue that binds us all together as human beings and nothing is more interesting or fascinating to me.
I subtitled Himba Pond Dance “Growing Up Is Never Easy and Never Ends” because that is my experience in life. No matter how adult and mature we might think we are we continue to be confronted by the sudden and unexpected and are forced to make difficult choices and decisions. If you’re like me when this happens you sometimes feel the way you did when you were a kid — over your head in deep and uncharted waters.
Just as Dee Dee is a strong adolescent protagonist in Valley of Saint Anne, Trey and Kim are in Himba Pond Dance. Having had such a delightful time with 12-year-old Dee Dee’s character, I was eager to continue the experience in Himba Pond Dance with 15-year-old Trey and his 13-year-old sister Kim. They are quite a pair, a bit more private than Dee Dee but just as inquisitive and observant and extremely resilient. They might seem more defiant than Dee Dee but that’s only because of their circumstances.
Sexuality is another subject of endless interest and fascination to me and just as I do in Valley of Saint Anne, I explore it and sexual identity in particular extensively in Himba Pond Dance, most notably in the relationship between Kim and Cyd.
Kim is at that stage where she’s just beginning to develop physically and this combined with the fact that she’s not interested in looking or acting “girly” and is more interested in playing soccer than in boys causes her to sometimes be mistaken for a boy. She tries her best not to let it get to her but it hurts all the same. Kim is approached after a game by Cyd, a player on the opposing team, who, in her own way, looks as boyish and seems to be equally uninterested in boys. Together they set out on an exploration of sexual identity that is as confusing and scary as it is exciting and exhilarating.
Trey isn’t at all confused about his sexual identity. He’s every bit the boy at that stage where he’s discovered the pleasure of masturbation and can’t get enough of it. As intelligent and respectful as he is of girls, he can’t help fantasizing about them as sexual objects and welcomes every opportunity to be alone with them. Trey’s journey leads him to discover that the girls in his life are more than just the means to satisfy his sexual appetite, that they also serve the valuable purpose of helping him to understand himself better, to grow and mature and become a responsible young adult, as difficult and painful as that can be sometimes.
Infidelity is another subject I examine in the story and do so as it affects several relationships, each of them differently. If you’ve been unfaithful in a relationship or someone has been unfaithful to you then you know how devastating and lasting its effects can be. Forgiving unfaithfulness is, I believe, one of the most difficult things in life for people to do and most people can’t, not truly, which is why most relationships don’t survive it. Once trust is broken it’s next to impossible to restore it.
It’s the “next to impossible” part that intrigues me and that I wanted to explore in this story. The fact of the matter is that when someone we love is unfaithful to us it doesn’t necessarily mean that we stop loving the person. Certainly, we view the person differently but it’s also true that we learn more about the person and ourselves as a result and sometimes what we learn softens the heart and enables us to forgive and when we do we become open to life again and once that happens anything is possible.
A final thought about my interest in writing about sexual identity. Obviously, it defines as human beings and it’s not a matter of “black or white” but more of varying shades of gray, which makes it a fascinating subject to write about. The “nature versus nurture” question aside, it’s a fact that while some people self-identify early on as “straight” or “gay” and remain so, others begin life “straight” and discover later they’re “gay” and vice-versa. Still others begin life “straight” yet have same-sex experiences and vice-versa. Some consider themselves asexual only to discover that with the right person in the right situation they’re anything but while others discover they’re attracted to both sexes. For some the issue of sexual identity is further complicated when they discover they’re the wrong gender.
There is also a political aspect to my interest. I have close and dear friends in the LGBTQ community and I want them represented in my stories, not gratuitously or as tokens but as central characters and people who are a vital part of society. I’ve experienced vicariously through friends the struggle of people in the LGBTQ community for equal rights. My personal feeling is that to discriminate against anyone based on his or her sexual orientation is ignorant and should be criminal, which it is in certain cases. Social mores change slowly but thankfully great strides have been made in just the last few years to afford gays the equal rights as citizens they have long deserved and been denied.
There is an older married lesbian couple, Angie and Phyllis, in Himba Pond Dance, gallery owners in Laguna Beach, CA. They’re New Yorkers and were married in Massachusetts, the first state to legalize same-sex marriage. I first wrote the scene in which Kim and Cyd pay Angie and Phyllis a visit and have a conversation with them in 2011. At the time same-sex marriage was illegal in California and when Phyllis voiced her optimism that it would soon be legal, Angie scoffed and rolled her eyes. As much as I hoped Phyllis was right and knew in my heart she was, I have to say I shared Angie’s skepticism.
Same-sex marriage became legal in California in 2013 and in 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down all state bans on same-sex marriage, legalized it in all fifty states, and required states to honor out-of-state same-sex marriage licenses.