Marie Gleeson

And that's another kind of key tenet for me about the book.

So you said there about writing it for the girls.

And there is an element of I do a lot of work in schools at the moment with 16, 17, 18 year olds, a lot of young women.

Doing what?

I go in and I work with them around life skills like communication, leadership, decision making.

You know, just I suppose, again, someone coming in to tell the story, especially a woman who went into an atypical job and went into a man's world.

I didn't talk like this back in the Navy.

I used a lot less words.

Yeah, but I think that piece of like the Navy was not the right job for me.

No career guidance teacher would have recommended the Navy to a girl from a farm in Tipperary in 1996 when I did my leaving search.

Like the Navy had only just taken women in 95.

So going into the Navy, like you can end up in a job that's totally not the right fit for you.

You could be, you know, you can, your leaving cert can go wrong, all these different things in your life.

You're, you know, you can face all these different challenges and storms.

But for the young women that I meet, for the people, for anybody, you know, you can survive the storms once you've

You can work on how you look at it and then you've got the support networks around you.

And I think that's why for me, this book is important for everybody, but for young women particularly.

And I have written it with the girls in mind in that instance of if I'm not around when they're facing a challenge in the future, they pick up the book and it doesn't matter what it is.

And yet you can go into the Navy and you can be totally, you know, like I look back at me when I joined first and I think, oh, my God, because I was so enthusiastic.

I was so driven.