The descent of a woman: Interesting story in current New Yorker

Laura Groff's - not a familiar name to me - shows up in the New Yorker summer fiction issue with a pretty good story, Above and Below, somewhat long and peripatetic account of a young grad student or T.A., English, in unnamed Florida university, who more or less goes off the rails and drifts into homelessness and some version of depression or perhaps bipolar disorder. Groff describes in great detail her spiraling descent, and the story has a good pace, keeps moving along as the (unnamed) central character goes deeper toward the bottom - from what starts out as maybe a few days camping at the beach and ends up living out of dumpsters and getting by in what seems like a commune of slovenly outcasts. We feel for this woman and keep hoping she'll get her life back on track but her descent seems so inevitable and unavoidable. She seems to have no friends, and Groff explains her difficult family life, her mother locked into her own problems and despair. As with so many New Yorker stories, this one seems to be a part of a longer work, with a little coda at the end of the story jumping forward several years in time - why do that? It's as if Groff, or the NYer editors, didn't know how to bring this narrative to a conclusion. A few elements were confusing: why is she talking about a "prairie" at the end when the whole story seems to be set in Florida? And what's the time setting? There are references to computers (laptops?) being tossed from a dorm window, but also to pay phones. All of this might be cleared up in the longer work from which this seems to be a selection.