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Marginalia
A podcast about books, ideas, and the people who live inside them. Slow, searching conversations — the kind you'd find scrawled in the margins.
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Episode 41
The Sentence Is the Room
with Orla Dunne
The Sentence Is the Room
with Orla Dunne · 28 May 2026
On the grammar of interiority, the ongoing haunting of Virginia Woolf, and the two years Orla spent rewriting a single chapter until the syntax was right.
Now playing · Ep. 41
The Sentence Is the Room
Show notes
Orla Dunne's second novel, Interior, took seven years to write — two of which were spent on a single chapter. We talked about what it means to let a sentence carry the full weight of a character's consciousness, and why she keeps returning to Woolf's Mrs Dalloway as a structural touchstone rather than a stylistic one.
We also get into how editorial pressure can flatten the exact quality that makes a book worth reading, and what she learned from translating Simone de Beauvoir before she ever finished a novel of her own.
Mentioned: The Waves, The Second Sex, Lydia Davis on the short sentence, and Alice Munro's chapter on time. Full transcript below ↓
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Vol. I–IV · 2023–2026Transcript excerpt
Ep. 41 · Orla Dunne
The sentence is not a vehicle. It's the room itself — the air pressure, the light coming through a particular window at a particular hour.
Helena: I want to start with something you said in an interview a while back — that you spent two years on a single chapter. Most people would abandon the book at that point.
Orla: I nearly did. Several times. The problem wasn't the events of the chapter. I knew what had to happen. It was the syntax. Every sentence I wrote made the character's interiority feel explained rather than inhabited. And once you explain interiority, you've murdered it.
Helena: So you were working at the level of the sentence the entire time?
Orla: At the level of the word, honestly. I kept asking: where does the pressure live? Not the emotional meaning — I mean the felt pressure, the thing that makes you hold your breath reading. And I kept finding it wasn't in the content, it was in the grammar.
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