The Classes

By C. Van Dusen

"The Classes" is an intimate and wry look at what really happens inside the nation's boutique-fitness industry. These are places with big personalities, big egos, big drama, and big problems -- places that promise to help people become their healthiest and happiest selves but frequently crush clients and coaches instead. Willa Marks is an athletic, funny, 40-year-old, married mother of two young boys who works in graphic design while teaching fitness classes at Atlanta's "B-list" gyms. She is surprised and flattered to be recruited by FitFams, one of the most exclusive and elite boutique fitness chains in the country, and finds herself swept up by its cultish, youth-obsessed, hard-partying world. This brings her face-to-face with the dark side of the business, and of herself. Deirdre "Dee" Bradley is the 32-year-old multimillionaire founder of FitFams. She grew up in hardscrabble Minnesota with an alcoholic mother, an absentee father, an eating disorder, and a sense of shame about her sexuality. She took that pain and struggle and used it as fuel to become a wildly successful entrepreneur, a caring philanthropist, and a hard-charging boss who suffers no fools. At least, that's the story she tells in Ted Talks and media interviews. In the studios and at New York City HQ, she harasses, body-shames, and emotionally abuses the people around her as a way to manage her own secret pain. As an award-winning magazine journalist with a 15-year career as a fitness coach, Van Dusen creates an emotional, entertaining, and humanizing story about the world of fitness, its fallout, and the reckoning that two women face.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0D9HC93C8
• ISBN13: 9798332995620
• Release Date: August 2024
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 380 Pages
• Weight: 1.42 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.9" x 6.0"