Like many women of her era, Bea Larsen married young and raised children. “I lived the life that women lived back then in the ’50s,” says Larsen, now 91 and a widow. “I never expected to do anything but be a homemaker until the ’60s hit and the world changed.” 

That’s when Larsen read Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which helped spur on the women’s movement. It was a wake-up call for Larsen. “I was trained to be a teacher, but instead, I went to law school at night,” Larsen says. “I had the great good fortune to have a very supportive husband who would feed and bathe the kids so I could go off to school.”

At age 40, Larsen became a lawyer, and her 50-year career—much of it as a mediator for divorcing couples—is at the center of The Third Person in the Room (2019). It’s a collection of essays, many of them based on Larsen’s mediations, that Kirkus Reviews calls “an emotional, thought-provoking read about the fragility of relationships.” 

The essays are short but often potent, as in “Please Wait,” in which Larsen talks about the death of her college roommate and longtime friend:

Now that she is gone, what I remember most is the warmth of her smile and the throaty laugh that so often punctuated our conversations, even the serious ones. I ache for her lonely husband. For a time, he will be in the arms of their children, and other friends and family will gather round, which consoles me. Then the empty house. Their dog searching for his other friend. 

Larsen’s essays are dramatic and humorous, informative and entertaining, personal and filled with stories from her law days.

When Larsen graduated from law school in 1969, she was already a trailblazer. One of only two women in her graduating class, she eventually became the first woman to be president of the Cincinnati Bar Association. Directly out of law school, she helped start the first public defender’s office in Cincinnati, eventually going into private practice.

“I didn’t know what was going to walk in the door of my private office, but it was at a time in the early ’80s when divorce cases started coming in,” Larsen says. She didn’t like taking those cases to court—it often pitted the two parties against each other and “tore families apart”—so she began concentrating on mediation, in which the two parties would talk with Larsen (hence, the “third person in the room”), who would then come up with an agreement.

“The parties who are ending their marriage who choose to do this through the mediation process already come with a strong motivation to keep their divorce civil and respectful,” Larsen says. “That doesn’t always work, but usually they’re highly motivated to protect their children from conflict.”

Beginning in the ’90s and for about a decade, Larsen presented weekly spoken essays on Cincinnati’s National Public Radio station. Though she updated them and wrote some new ones, those essays became the basis for The Third Person in the Room, which she began putting together three years ago when she retired at age 88.

“Here I was in my late 80s, wanting to look back and crystallize and put into writing the insights that I had gained over time and share them,” Larsen says. “Only half of the essays deal with my mediation cases. The other half…are much more personal.” 

The book is divided into 11 overarching themes, including “Communication,” “Marriage and Partnership,” “Friendship,” “Expectations,” and “Negotiation.”

Larsen uses real cases—maintaining confidentiality, of course—to talk about many of these topics, but she also draws from her own life, including her marriage and three children. In the essay “Soul Mates: Myth or Reality?” she lays bare her own marriage to her husband, Len:

As the years went by, Len and I came to accept that we did not share many of each other’s interests. We set aside the romantic dream that somehow we could be all things to each other. Over time we became more autonomous as we alternately fostered each other’s careers and longings. Our mutual attraction and respect, and our growing family, were the glue that carried us through the difficult days.

Putting The Third Person in the Room together was “trial and error,” the author says. “I had no experience at all.” A good friend’s daughter who is a copy editor in New York urged her to put her collection of essays into a book, and a friend from her bar association days, now in the communications business, helped design and market it. “We were putting one foot in front of the other, but we were learning together,” Larsen says.

Though she continues to write a monthly column for the Cincinnati Bar Association newsletter, Larsen believes The Third Person in the Room will be her only book. She’s not as active in the community as she once was, and she believes, like one of her favorite authors, that that’s a must for an author.

“Philip Roth, whose books I loved and devoured, when he hit 80, he announced to the world that he would no longer write,” she says. “His statement was very interesting….He said he was no longer out in the world.…My life since retirement has become a lot more circumscribed, and I’m no longer, so to speak, ‘out in the world,’ although the book has drawn me out in the world to a certain extent.”

Larsen will continue to write, she says, and she remains a voracious reader. “In recent years, I am drawn to well-written literary mystery,” she says. “I love Elizabeth George, Donna Leon, Louise Penny. I love those literary mysteries that really develop the characters, their insides, their psychology. I jokingly say that in this world today, it’s wonderful to read a book where you always know the good guy wins in the end.”

Alec Harvey, past president of the Society for Features Journalism, is a freelance writer based in Alabama.