My inner French girl...hmmm...did one lurk inside my baggy sweats and carpool mom façade? Could I too wear the perfect scarf and tie it just so, a skill I'm convinced is genetic in female Gauls?

After reading Entre Nous - A Womans’ Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl by Debra Ollivier, I now have hope. So will you. And probably inhale this thin, blue, white and red tome in one sitting–or at one high school lacrosse practice as I did.

How do French women enter the room, projecting an élan most of us can only dream of and tackle the foie gras without gaining a waist size, look put together on a shoestring budget and not break a sweat running down the Métro steps? Debra Ollivier explains it all. Not just the mythic French woman in a little black dress, rope of pearls wearing sunglasses in the restaurant dining en famille on Sunday with stunningly well-behaved children. Ollivier explodes the stereotype of the gamin with a Bardot pout, Catherine Deneuve complexion and Simone de Beauvoir brain. It’s de rigeur that a French woman takes care of herself with weekly facials but that’s built into her life.

The stunning revelation here is to attain the French woman’s inner, stress that word INNER, sense of ease in one’s skin. Living in the moment, an appreciation of the sensual and of course, always the spontaneous moment. My Parisienne friend Anne-Françoise illustrates this perfectly. No snacking between meals, a spritz of eau de parfum for a visit to even the corner boulangerie, an intense interest in the world, a love of passionate debate, the focus on quality not quantity - one good handbag and coat as wardrobe staples and even wearing heels ‘C’est normale!’ to the Commissariat when her apartment was burgled.

Ollivier dishes on that je ne sais quoi that French women project and how us American women can attain it. Evenings are spent with friends, lunches with her family on Sunday, taking in the current exhibition and always making time for the sensual side. Ollivier says "Where French girls seek culture or knowledge, we seek self-improvement, self-help...our burden and our blessing.”

Or as Coco Chanel put it "There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time.” Trust me, read this book, there is hope!

Cara Black is the author of the Aimée Leduc mysteries: Murder in the Marais, Murder in Belleville, Murder in the Sentier, and Murder in the Bastille which is being released in paperback in May.

You can meet Cara at Café Society in Napa on Saturday May 8.