How do you raise a superstar? Tina Knowles’s memoir tells us

The most awarded artist in Grammy history, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, has changed not only music but culture. So, where does such a person spring from? Are they born or made? Her mother Tina Knowles’s memoir Matriarch tackles precisely these questions; while Beyoncé’s father’s involvement in her career is well-known, her mum’s has been less visible — until now.

Music fans looking for insider gossip will be largely disappointed because that’s not the subject of Matriarch. Rather, Knowles zooms out over generations to tell her family’s story – and assert her own. What do we pass on, intentionally or otherwise? And if pouring yourself into a child sees them flourish, where do you draw the self-preservatory line? Ultimately, Matriarch is Knowles’s reckoning with the sacrifices she made for her family.

From her tumultuous marriage to her pivotal role in her daughters’ careers (including those by choice rather than birth, like Kelly Rowland, Beyoncé’s bandmate from the Destiny’s Child days, and Knowles’s niece Angie), Matriarch is definitively told from Knowles’s perspective, after years of effacing it in service of others. Accessible and confessional, yet with a distinctly declarative tone that imbues whatever she’s communicating with a sense of profundity, Knowles – along with her ghostwriter, Kevin Carr O’Leary – is a gifted storyteller who weaves together intergenerational narratives into an impressively cohesive whole.

A young Tina Knowles (Photo: Matriarch by Tina Knowles/[email protected])

“I had tried to teach my daughters to know their value […], but I hadn’t truly modelled it,” she explains. Ultimately, Knowles wants to understand her role in one of humanity’s most persistent conundrums: nature or nurture? The answer she arrives at – both – is either nuanced or a cop-out, depending on how you look at it. There can be no questioning her dedication and decades of tireless labour in service to her daughters, but just because something was gruelling doesn’t mean it was pivotal.

On the other hand, the way in which Knowles cultivated an empowering environment for her children is not only admirable but demonstrably impactful. Despite music industry naysayers, the costumes she made for Destiny’s Child were recognised by Vogue and echoed on catwalks across the world. Meanwhile, her championing of black power and beauty pulses through Solange and Beyoncé’s artistic output.

Every parent worries about their influence on their kids — having those hugely human conundrums considered by someone who raised the world’s most famous pop star is a blessing and a curse. In Matriarch, Knowles’s role is both magnified beyond all scale and impossible to overstate — considering who she mothered; it’s hard to imagine how it could be anything else.

Destiny’s Child in 2000 (Photo: Dave Hogan/Getty)

Matriarch opens with a family tree stretching back to 1800: it is heavy with history and family names: Célestine on her mother’s side (Tina’s given first name) and variations of the surname Beyoncé on her father’s (when her mother Agnes tried to correct spelling errors on their birth certificates, “[she] was told, ‘Be happy that you’re getting a birth certificate [at all].'”) In time, Tina would give it to her first daughter: “our history. The most valuable possession I had.” In the context of the black liberation movement, both historical and recent, the decision feels profound rather than overly sentimental.

While Matriarch begins in 1950s Texas, where its narrator was born, those roots are ever-present. Handed down to Tina and her siblings in stories, “a long drama that I was now a part of,” their family saga is as harrowing as it is beautiful; one ancestor, Célestine Lacy, was impregnated by Éloi Broussard, a relative of the widow who enslaved her family. Eventually, after buying her and their children at an auction, Éloi moved Célestine into the house he shared with his white wife and daughters. “Éloi was my great-grandfather,” writes Knowles, caught between gratitude for his unusual duty to her foremother and fury at the circumstances of their relationship. “With all its awful complexity, that is who he was.”

Divided into three acts, A Daughter, A Mother, and A Woman, the first part of Matriarch takes in Tina’s early life – a happy time, despite her family’s relative poverty and experiences of racism (“it was long talked about in the community that cops took us to the beach […] only to shoot us and say we resisted or ran away.”) Throughout Matriarch, such scrupulous accounts of systemic discrimination and violence paint a vivid picture of a topic that can otherwise feel hard to grasp — one of the book’s greatest strengths.

Beyonce and Solange performing at Coachella Festival in 2018 (Photo: Kevin Mazur/Getty)

Although she was celebrated for her wilfulness (reflected in her childhood nickname, Badass Tenie B), Knowles explains how her mother’s fear for her safety led her to feel constrained. Leaving home at eighteen, she eventually met Mathew Knowles, and the pair began an off-on relationship that would span three decades and produce two extraordinary children: Beyoncé and Solange. But while Knowles swears never to pass on her mother’s anxieties, she does mirror her selfless devotion to her family.

Luckily for their fans, her experiences often involve her (inarguably more famous) kids. “At two months old, […] it was jazz that soothed [Beyoncé]”, recalls Knowles, while baby Solange was much more interested in words. Later, doing Beyoncé’s hair for an early-career video, Knowles cut highlights from her own head to supplement some extensions – as another makeup artist jokes, “‘That’s a mother’s love.'” And she reveals that contrary to popular opinion, Destiny’s Child wasn’t engineered for Beyoncé to go solo – that “she loved being part of a group”.

On the one hand, Knowles is proud to have broken generational patterns while noting their symmetry on the other: “I often wonder what my mother could have crafted if she had more exposure, more education […] Solange is the fulfilment.” And while Matriarch ends with Knowles deciding to prioritise herself after two divorces and breast cancer, her decision to step back from her daughters’ careers once they’re already established makes it much less of a wrench.

Beyoncé and Tina Knowles at the Mufasa: The Lion King” premiere in 2024 (Photo: Gilbert Flores/Variety/Getty)

TThere’s a lot of God in Matriarch, too, which might not faze American readers but pulled me up short several times (reading a book with a group she’s mentoring, Knowles reassures her reader: “whenever we came to a curse word, we only said the first letter.” Phew!) Meanwhile, when the members of Destiny’s Child got their first big paychecks, she encouraged them to tithe the money – “God will bring it back to you in ways you can’t imagine,” she promised.

Of course, it’s only human to use big ideas – be they religion, genetics or environment – to explain what is ultimately unaccountable. No question, something alchemical came together in Tina Knowles’s children, and she has every right to be extremely proud as well as tell her own (fascinating) story.

What makes Beyoncé Beyoncé, Tina Tina, or you you? Matriarch poses big, pertinent questions, and the answers it offers are largely thoughtful. Packing plenty of wisdom even if neither you nor your progeny are global superstars, Matriarch insists on the multiplicity in us all – daughter, woman, mother, no matter how we came to be that way.