[5] Koe has described her cultural experience growing up in 1990s Singapore as "omnivorous", watching Tsui Hark wuxia films and Disney movies.

[6] She fell in love with a female Uyghur soccer player when her softball team went on a training trip to Shanghai,[7] and was sent to corrective counseling when teachers found out she had a girlfriend.

[5] While working as a waitress in a Japanese restaurant and freelancing for a creative agency, Koe had a manic episode, following which she resigned from her roles and began writing full time.

[11] While browsing for a Nan Goldin photobook at The Strand in Manhattan, Koe encountered an Alfred Eisenstaedt monograph with Marlene Dietrich on its cover.

The collection caused a sensation in Singapore's literary landscape when it was published,[10] for its uncommon and unflinching depiction of idiosyncratic characters from social peripheries told via inventive narratives that questioned the conservative Singaporean state's ideological imperatives.

[16] Kirkus Reviews said:For a novel so dense with historical fact and larger-than-life celebrity cameos (everyone from John F. Kennedy to Walter Benjamin to David Bowie), its portrayals are nuanced enough that each character comes off as deeply human regardless of their fame or importance to the novel's plot ...

[17]NPR said:It is the moral tightropes each woman walks, and the razor thin edge between fulfilling one's ambition and selling one's soul, that is at the core of the novel (...) It is hard to summarize a sprawling and ambitious novel like this, so I won't — but it is expertly woven, its characters alive and full-bodied.

Blending questions about pop culture, war, and art, Delayed Rays of a Star is that rare book that is neither high- nor low-brow, refusing such facile dichotomies and playing, instead, in the messiness of the grey areas.

[5] She has stated the importance of cinema in her life, citing Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras's Hiroshima mon amour, Chantal Akerman's Jeanne Dielman, Wong Kar-wai's Fallen Angels, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, and Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers as films that have had a significant influence on her.