Photo by Guoda Kavaliauskaitė

Vaiva Rykštaitė (born 1985) is a pen name which approximately means “Rainbow”. Its owner grew up in Kaunas and started an international model career as a teenager. She says she saw too much dirt in the world of fashion so she returned home. She studied philosophy in Kaunas and in London. Then she went to India expecting to become a yoga teacher, but that career also ended with a trauma that again brought her home. Then she turned her attention to Hawaii, which seems to be the current (prolonged) phase of her life. Living there with her husband and two young daughters, the family runs a small business, while Vaiva continues to write. She is a blogger and a social media influencer as well as the author of eight books, two for children, three self-help titles based on personal experience, and three novels which also appear to be quite openly autobiographical. 

Lizos butas (Liza’s Apartment). Vilnius: Tyto alba, 2020, – 264 pp. 

Liza has moved. The new residents of her apartment are Gintarė, her mom and dad. Then, dad moves out. A new dad moves in, later he moves out too, and a third one moves in. And another. And another. Gintarė from a little girl grows up to a teenager, and later to a young woman. She adores her mom and wants to be like her, a femme fatale, always with a glass of champagne and loving many men. While all this happens within the apartment, the world outside changes too. People stand in the Baltic Way, Soviet tanks roll in on the 13th of January, 1991, the crazy times of the wild 90s capitalism arrive. Readers squeal with nostalgia about all the tiny, perfectly remembered and restored details of everyday life in Kaunas in the 90s: the food, the language, the clothes, the communication, the games, the everyday practices. The book is warm and fun, with the love between the mother and the daughter squarely at the center.