Celebrity memoirs are having a moment. Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Jessica Simpson, Prince Harry. They’ve all risen above the tabloid fodder with revelatory tellings of their own lives. Celebrity mother memoirs, however, have remained in the bargain basement of cash-grab dregs — see Lynne Spears and Eminem’s mum selling their own children down the river. Tina Knowles has raised the bar with Matriarch: A Memoir.
Yes she’s the mother to Beyoncé and Solange, two of the most celebrated women on the planet. But this is about so much more than the women she raised. Growing up in poverty on Galveston Island, Texas, segregation and racism touched every aspect of her girlhood.
She was corporally punished by the nuns at the church school that kept her family in what was essentially indentured servitude in return for an education. An elder brother was savagely beaten by police, while Knowles suffered an invasive medical exam tantamount to sexual assault at 14 at the hands of white doctors. There were seats they couldn’t sit in, shops they couldn’t enter, spurious arrests and strip searches. At 21 she almost died being sucked out to sea by a riptide on the dangerous designated black beach.
Even when she escaped to Houston, ascended to the middle class and watched her first-born become a star, she was attuned to the flagrant discrimination. Incidents she recalls where the police were called to a Destiny’s Child concert at Disney World, threatening to arrest Beyoncé for throwing a towel into the audience, or a top photographer lazily requesting that her signature wavy hair be scraped back in a bun.
Sometimes, as with most memoirs, there are moments recalled from decades ago that seem too poetically on the nose, or prone to obvious mythmaking. Of course, the infant Beyoncé could not be soothed by basic nursery rhymes and would only nap to Gil Scott-Heron’s The Revolution Will not be Televised.
She is respectful of her elder daughter’s intense privacy — as she should be — but this leaves some obvious lacunas in a story even casual celeb-watchers are familiar with. There is no discussion of what, exactly, happened in that infamous Met Gala elevator ride.
Knowles is candid about the turbulence of her first marriage to Mathew Knowles, the father of her children, the original manager of Destiny’s Child and a compulsive cheater. She tried to leave him many times over the course of their decades-long marriage, but financial pressure and her own low self-worth impeded her.
Knowles deftly elides direct comparison, but it does make you wonder about Beyoncé, who has staunchly remained with a man 12 years her senior who has all but admitted to infidelity in their music.
When Knowles is free to give both barrels, she is astounding in her power. She used her tailoring skills to help Beyoncé hide her pregnancy with Blue Ivy following a series of devastating miscarriages, only to watch in helpless rage when media speculation accused her daughter of faking it, denying her motherhood.
This is an agony that radiates down from their enslaved foremothers who fought to keep their babies. “Y’all are not going to kill my children with this madness,” says Knowles.
There are points where the boss-business-lady narrative wears thin, but at 71 Knowles has earned some self congratulation. It was therapy that helped her make a breakthrough to finally leave her first marriage: “I had allowed my life outside my children’s needs to become a blur.”
By the time she receives a shock breast cancer diagnosis at the age of 70, she is able to receive the return of all that love and care she poured into her daughters. There’s a touching moment where Beyonce, Solange and Kelly Rowland all gather round her before surgery to sing and share the “very demure” meme to send off her larger cup size.
With a skillful assist from ghostwriter Kevin Carr O’Leary, this is a mother memoir that, like Knowles herself, stands proud in a lineage of singular excellence.
Matriarch: A Memoir by Tina Knowles is out now (Dialogue, £25).
