Our Business is Emotion: Affective Labor in the Workplace Wellness Novel

Wellness culture, what we might understand as the future-oriented transformation of negative affect into positive, has created a bind: in the contemporary understanding of wellness, often reduced to discrete behavioral patterns and purchases, why is it that the problems facing individuals today are solved through individual labor, rather than through collective change? Part of a larger post-2015 boom in workplace novels, Catherine Lacey’s The Answers (2017) and Claire Stanford’s Happy for You (2022) situate their protagonists’ labor within industries of wellness, asking a shared question: can those who work in service of the wellness industry themselves benefit from it? By framing their protagonists’ labors as an affective economy, where emotions are commodified, traded and consumed, these novels engage with the neoliberal, individualistic underpinnings of wellness. I argue that these novels’ curious affective registers allows them to alternately critique and sustain this machinery, as they operate within a neoliberal framework of selfhood that fundamentally resists the kinds of collective betterment promised by wellness culture.