A little over a decade ago, during quiet moments traveling between New York and Houston, Tina Knowles started freestyling, recording memories and childhood stories in voice notes on her cellphone.
Then 59, Knowles was still busy styling and mothering her world-conquering daughters Beyoncé and Solange Knowles (she counts Kelly Rowland and a niece, Angie Beyincé, as her own, too) and had just divorced her husband of 31 years. There had been several deaths in her family.
“I just started thinking about mortality, and ‘I’m not gonna be here forever,’” she said. “I felt old, I felt sad.” She wanted to leave a legacy for her kids and grandchildren.
As Knowles, now 71, sat earlier this month in the great room of her home atop a Hollywood Hill, a sunny space filled with gallery-sized artwork at every turn, she described that personal nadir while infrequently waving a hand adorned with a few knuckle-sized gold rings and manicured in a bright red that matched her lipstick. Having changed into a tan Alo sweatsuit after a photo shoot — the right sleeve eventually slipped, leaving her shoulder bare — she radiated an offhand sultriness, a nonchalant glamour that couldn’t have been more removed from the dark era that launched the project.
Her resulting memoir, “Matriarch,” available Tuesday, brings Knowles’s life to center stage. It has the drama of her upbringing in the segregated South and the personal improvement journey of a working mom compelled to stand up for her kids but not herself, as well as cautionary optimism: Knowles reveals for the first time that she was diagnosed with stage 1A breast cancer in 2022. (After surgery and treatment, she is cancer free — and daring to dress in “sheer mesh” after undergoing a reduction. “That was my silver lining.”)
