Daddy's (not) Home - Story Katania in current New Yorker

Lara Vapnyer's story Katania in the current New Yorker flirts with autobiography - it's a story that, at least till the closing sequence, seems to be a essayistic memoir, a mature woman recollecting a difficult childhood friendship, and in this case I think the story gets most of its stature from the sense that V. is actually telling a truth rather than a fiction, or at the very least using fiction to get as close as she can get to the truth (I have worked a bit in this mode myself - have written a very few first-person fictional narratives with the intention of making the reader think they are "true" and in fact they are mostly true but the fictional frame gives me, and every author, greater license to select, invent, and arrange - fiction gets at a higher truth); the main reason we're interested in V.'s story is that it give uus "news" of what it was like for a young girl to grow up in Soviet Russia - she very precisely captures the deprivations and the misery, all the more sorrowful in that there was no reason for such abject poverty and blankness, just the stupidity of Soviet social engineers. She memorably describes her apartment complex as like a skyscraper set on its side, and we get the whole picture. She befriends a rather spoiled and petulant schoolmate who's in even more dire poverty - nobody has fathers around and the heart of the story centers on the desire for a "daddy" doll as part of the doll family set - a real scarcity, like a Dodger's baseball card for guys I guess - because her father defected - leaving her mother to lose her job and you can just imagine, a crappy one-room apartment, the child lets herself in with a key each day after school and heats up some watery soup. Anyway, the story is excellent as long as the young kids and their difficult friendship are in the forefront, but then V. takes a big leap in time, the two girls are now adult women living in the U.S., V. successful in her career (presumably we're close to autobio again) though not in her family life, and her friend now very wealthy and still superficial and narcissistic; V. visits her at her home in the Berkshires and - giving the ending away here - the kicker is that the friend's husband has a limp, exactly like the daddy doll they'd fought over as kids. Actually, I don't believe it for a second - this has the clumsy hand of authorial manipulation, and does disservice to the rest of the story, which is strong entirely because it's so credible and authentic.