Fiction, autofiction, and the essay in Lauren Groff's works

The last story in Lauren Groff's new collection, Florida, "Yporte," is a piece that seems close to autofiction, a current trend in writing that blends autobiography w/ fiction, a writer telling his or her life story using all of the elements of literary fiction - Ferrante and Knausgaard being two of the most prominent practitioners. Yporte is not by any means on the epic scope of their work, but it's long as far as stories go; Groff uses a 3rd-person narrator - always referring to the protagonist as "the mother," in this story/essay about a mom who takes her two young sons on a month-long August vacation in Normandy, ostensibly so that she can pursue some research on Guy de Maupassant, at one time in her life a literary hero whom she begins to see as a misogynist brute. From what we can glean about the status details of Groff's life, everything in this story feels factual, and we have the sense that she could have published this as a first-person essay or travel piece, has she wished to. Many small things happen over the course of this story, but there's no arc to the story and no grand conclusion; as w/ a # of her stories, there are hints of marital difficulties but an overall sense that she and her husband are a solid couple even if both are somewhat obsessive and eccentric (he, at least, is not a writer). It's interesting to see Groff's evolution: Compare this with the 1st story in the collection, Ghosts and Empties, which, also, feels like an essay (about the changing neighborhood in which she and her family live) but is more openly autobiographical, using the first-person narration, which up till this point Groff seems to eschew. Would Yporte be any different had it been told in first person? Not dramatically so, but the first person seems a more honest (if restrictive) mode for this material. I actually admire Groff's preference for third-person narration - 1st-person present tense, with its air of breathlessness and headlong rush of incident, is a terrible trend in fiction, I think - but I think it's great that she's pushing on the borderlines of fiction and wonder if she will do further exploration of the possibilities of autofiction and the essay. Florida, as a whole, shows her growth in style and narrative control in the short-story form, and it bodes well for her further writing and success.