Half-A-Room described by Ono as a response to her feeling at the time that "there was a half empty space in my life" as a result of the increasing estrangement of her and her second husband, Anthony Cox. Ono awoke one day and noticed that her Cox had not returned from a night out, and so the bed was half empty, and through this realised that there was "a half empty space in my life". The magazine "Another Magazine" wrote in 2015 that the piece "speaks to the pointlessness of material things without the human connection that gives them meaning; the
A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing In a "New York Times" review, Joshua Cohen described the book as being "in all respects, a heresy — which is to say, Lord above, it’s a future classic." Reviewing the novel for "The Guardian", Anne Enright wrote that it "is hard to read for the best reasons: everything about it is intense and difficult and hard-won." The novel won several awards including the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize, the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. The Guardian Book Club featured the novel in 2016, and