The concept of emotional labour pervades recent popular discourse. However, this discourse tends to emphasize the unpaid work performed in personal and familial relationships. This erases Arlie Russell Hochschild's distinction between emotion work and emotional labour, the latter of which is a waged 'management of feeling' that 'create[s] a publicly observable facial and bodily display'. This focus on unwaged emotion work identifies a real site of exploitation, but tends to obscure the recent historical tendency of care work to be subsumed increasingly into new forms of low-waged labour. I examine this tendency by turning to Catherine Lacey's speculative novel The Answers (2017), which follows an indebted young woman, Mary, who takes a contract job in an experiment run by a celebrity seeking love. Alongside 'girlfriends' with other intimate roles, Mary is paid to be an 'Emotional Girlfriend.' I argue that the novel's thought experiment of splitting the various roles of a romantic partner into separate, waged jobs not only commodifies affective labour, but also replicates the process of industrial deskilling in its depiction of the real subsumption of affective work into the service sectors. Next, I discuss the role of the experiment's Research Division, which not only monitors experimental subjects via cameras, sensors, and interviews, but also directly influences their behaviour using 'internal directives', or chemical instructions that biologically optimize emotion. I argue that these directives intensify the management of feeling to make working subjects' emotions more productive for capital. The argument concludes that The Answers updates Hochschild's theory to account for work that is now often less secure, but fails to address the political questions it raises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]