Today we’d like to introduce you to Kristy McCormally.
Hi Kristy, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
Let me be clear at the outset: I did not come from cocktail people. Lake City, Florida, was not a martini town, and ours was not a martini house. My mother worked, and she had no patience for fuss, but no one left our house for a trip home without a cooler packed with enough to share with their friends. She was feeding people she had never met. I just didn’t know yet that it counted as entertaining.
When I finally figured out that the cocktail hour is the load-bearing wall of the whole enterprise, I had a lot of catching up to do. The University of Florida taught me a great deal about tailgating and almost nothing about the cheese course.
My real education came at Fawn Lake, from a crowd of retirees who had led far more interesting lives than I had and who gave dinner parties as reliably as they teed off on Tuesdays and Thursdays. They had done it so many times they could do it in their sleep. They also taught me FHB, Family Hold Back, which my mother never once said and which I consider one of the great contributions to Western civilization.
In 2023 Brian and I landed in Suffolk, Virginia, in a 1909 Classical Revival house on Bank Street with a dining table that seats fourteen and not one friend in town to put around it. So we invited strangers. I make the drink. Brian gives the tour, the cocktail-hour version, because left to his own devices he will give the three-hour one and the ice will be water. Boy-girl, boy-girl is a rule, not a guideline, and spouses do not sit together.
That is how a woman from Lake City came to make a living writing about the dinner table. I write two columns for The Supper Club Magazine, and one of them, Dear Mom, How Do I Host?, also runs in newspapers. Homeworthy filmed the house this summer, and 386,000 people (as of this writing) have toured it on YouTube, which is roughly 385,986 more than I can seat. So Brian and I are opening The Inn at Bank and Grace downtown. Fourteen chairs was apparently not enough.
I use the good china on weeknights now, yogurt included. Life is short, and Herend did not make it to sit in the dark. Most women I know already own the china. What they’re short on is the nerve to send the invitation. Send it. Tonight is the occasion.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Of course there have been struggles. A woman who claims she has none is either fibbing or has never given a dinner party, and I wouldn’t trust her with the seating chart either way. Struggle is what makes a person interesting. Imagine if I had never evolved beyond a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I would be a perfectly pleasant woman with nothing whatsoever to say, and you would be interviewing someone else.
The hardest part of Suffolk was arriving with no one. I had a dining table that seats fourteen and no circle of women to help fill it, which is how I learned that when you are new in town, you are the committee. You write the invitations and you pray.
They came. I have a beautiful family and wonderful friends, and I would put every one of them up against anybody’s.
What Brian and I found in Suffolk is a town that can use everything we picked up along the way. Downtown is working its way back, and so is our historic neighborhood, and it turns out a lifetime of dinner parties is excellent training for civic life. You learn who ought to sit next to whom, and you learn Family Hold Back. Both come in handy at a city meeting.
So if your own downtown is trying to come back, go have dinner there this week. Order dessert.
Appreciate you sharing that. What else should we know about what you do?
I studied public relations at the University of Florida, which is excellent training for a woman who will spend the rest of her life talking people into things. I used it in every venture I ever had, and I have had a few. I have always been independent and entrepreneurial. What I had not found was the thing that made me hop out of bed in the morning.
I am a writer by education, and for most of my life I did not much enjoy writing. It felt like homework with better stationery. Then Brian and I moved to Suffolk, and I settled into the house and the life I actually wanted to write about. Now I cannot stop.
My calling found me in my fifties, and I have come to believe that was the right time. At twenty-five I would not have recognized it. In my fifties I was mature enough to know it when I saw it and ready enough to take it.
I hope everyone finds what makes them happy, and I hope it’s something they are good at. The first without the second is a hobby. The second without the first is a job.
This chapter is a good one, and mine is a never-too-late story. You try hard until the courage finds you. So if you are past fifty and still waiting for the thing that gets you out of bed, start on it Monday. It is not too late.
What are your plans for the future?
Most couples our age downsize. Brian and I took on the 1905 home across the street. It will be The Inn at Bank and Grace, a bed and breakfast in Suffolk’s historic district, and we hope to open in the fall of 2027.
The rest of the calendar belongs to family. My daughter is getting married, and we are counting on more grandchildren. Between the Inn and the family, there will be no shortage of beds to make up or people to feed, which suits me fine. I have never once complained about a full table.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.truitthouseliving.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/truitthouseliving/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruittHouseLiving
- Other: https://truitthouseliving.substack.com
