Tina Knowles is a matriarch above all else. Best known as Beyoncé and Solange’s mother, her own life trajectory, chronicled in her new memoir, is even more fascinating. The 400-plus page “Matriarch” charts her poor upbringing in Galveston, Texas, under the self-ascribed nickname Badass Tenie B; dabbling in singing, sewing and beauty; and her tumultuous marriage to Mathew Knowles.
As a working mom as well as a mother figure to Beyoncé’s bandmate Kelly Rowland and niece Angie Beyincé, Knowles persevered to open a hair salon for professional Black women in Houston. Her current role as vice chair of Beyoncé’s haircare line, Cécred, was a no-brainer.
Knowles debunks her reputation as a stage mom, though she carried on her matrilineal penchant for designing and sewing clothes, as the stylist for Destiny’s Child. She also gets candid, writing about being diagnosed with breast cancer last summer (she is now in remission) and being subjected to an unwanted, invasive gynecological exam as a teenager — “I thought it was really important to [talk about it now] so that people understand how traumatic something like that is and that doctors need to be super-sensitive about anything like that.”
Ultimately, “Matriarch” is a story of “generation after generation of women who made something out of nothing,” Knowles says. “The legacy of my grandmothers being slaves, overcoming, surviving and keeping their families together.”
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Why was now the right time to publish a memoir?
I had been writing one for quite some time for my children and my grandchildren. My parents were older when they had me; I never met my grandparents. I used to press my mom about [my family] history. So I wanted to leave something for my grandchildren so that they would know me and their ancestors.
Now is the time because people have so many misconceptions about my family and I wanted to tell the story myself and not have anyone else tell it.
It’s very thorough, coming in at more than 400 pages. How long have you been working on this and what was the writing process like?
I’d been recording into a phone so I had a lot of notes and a lot of recordings, but I actually wrote it for a little over two years. Going back and remembering was easy because I’m a storyteller. The hardest part was cutting it down to 400 pages. It [started out as] 1,000 pages!
Sometimes the stories of family members or people close to super–famous people can become inextricable from one another, but in “Matriarch” your story and perspective is really strong. How did you maintain your voice throughout?
When I [was in conversations] about doing the book, I was adamant that people would have to be interested in my story and my perspective because that’s what they’re going to get. They’re not going to get the story of my kids. To a certain degree [they are intertwined], but there’s not anything that’s uber personal or invasive [to them]. They’ve got their own stories to tell.
Did your daughters or anyone else in your family have any trepidation about any of the stories you share that have overlap with their own? And if so how did you approach that?
Every time my kids were mentioned in the book I sent them [the pages] to make sure they were OK with [it]. I was very respectful of what stories were theirs to tell. They didn’t have any trepidation. They didn’t say, “I don’t want you to talk about this or that.” Thank God!
Naming is a big theme throughout the book, whether that be the misspelling of your maiden name or choosing your daughter’s names. How important was it to chart the history of your family through naming?
It was very important. Growing up in a family where everybody’s [last] name was spelled differently was something that we never really put that much thought into. I became interested in it when I was doing research, going back and trying to find my ancestors. How did it get changed so many times? The original spelling is Boyancé. It was really interesting to go through that exercise of trying to find it spelled like we spelled it.
[Another] very interesting thing that happened was that Solange’s name came from a French baby name book that I got in Paris for one of my friends. I wound up getting the book back from her and picked that name out of all of the names in that book. I recently found out that my great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother and great-great-great-grandmother all had the first or middle name Solange. It blew my mind. The ancestors were speaking to me.
You write about some traumatic things in the book, like your medical assault as a teenager and your recent breast cancer diagnosis. You mention that being in the hospital for your breast cancer treatments brought up some trauma, but was writing about those things triggering?
It was actually very healing for me. When that happened to me as a teenager, I didn’t talk about it because it was embarrassing and I had shame about it. I didn’t do anything wrong. I told my older sister that day, but after that I didn’t tell anybody until years and years later when I dealt with it in therapy and realized how traumatic it was. I thought it was really important to [talk about it now] so that people understand how traumatic something like that is and that doctors need to be super-sensitive about anything like that. Being poor, people don’t see you as human. They see you as an experiment. It wasn’t just the racism, it was being poor and not having a voice.
If Beyoncé or Solange wanted to write a memoir themselves, what advice would you have for them?
I hope that both of them will because they have such interesting lives and they can inspire a lot of people with their stories. Writing your life story is so healing in so many ways, I think it would be a really great experience for them. I think everybody should write their life story, whether it’s published or not. Just to leave it for your kids.
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