A sea of women, many rushing in from work, heels clicking, Cécred tote bags slung over shoulders, clutched copies of Tina Knowles’s 400-page memoir as they filled a casino theater outside of D.C. on Wednesday. Inside, speakers reverberated with the voices of Solange, Beyoncé and Kelly Rowland. The first two are Knowles’s daughters. All three are famous singers, and all offered tributes to the woman they call Mama T.
When former first lady Michelle Obama greeted Knowles onstage the audience didn’t just applaud, they bowed. The two women spoke like aunties at a kitchen table, swapping stories about motherhood, fighting childhood bullies and staying behind the scenes until their time in the limelight came.
This was the first stop on the book tour for Knowles’s debut memoir “Matriarch.” She told the audience she had resisted many previous suggestions to tell her story. She wondered whether it was worth sharing a book about a girl from Jim Crow-era Galveston, Texas, who opened a hair salon with the intent of leaving her marriage. Would the public want to hear about how she scraped together fabrics to make outfits for Destiny’s Child in the late 1990s, when Beyoncé and best friend Rowland sang in the pop group, and Solange sometimes performed as a backup dancer. Or how she almost missed her early-stage breast cancer diagnosis? For years, she didn’t think so. But now, at 71, she’s decided otherwise.
After her divorce from music executive Mathew Knowles at 59, Knowles didn’t feel free, she felt old.
“I don’t even like to say it, but the truth is, I felt like life was over,” she told The Washington Post in an interview. “Where am I ever going to meet somebody? What am I going to do now? I’m going to be lonely.”
She laughed a little at the thought of herself back in the clubs, but the fear was real. For a woman who had spent decades building a famous family, a hair salon in Houston and an image of strength, the silence of starting over was terrifying. It wasn’t until her therapist asked her to list everything she had accomplished that she began to recognize herself again. “The great things way outweighed the bad,” she said. That year, she threw herself back into her art, visited museums alone, and reclaimed her time. “I realized it wasn’t my kids that were monopolizing me — it was me.”
Knowles, who is still Beyoncé’s wardrobe stylist for the “Cowboy Carter tour,” appeared in a color block black-and-silver glittery gown at the event. Obama was in host mode: warm, witty and gently pointed. She threw slight jabs at her husband’s successor, President Donald Trump, lamenting the way “we’ve stopped believing in excellence” and the erosion of basic empathy in national leadership.
But the conversation kept returning to their shared purpose: raising daughters who are grounded and loved but not coddled.
“We’re not your little friends, not until you’ve grown into someone I want to be friends with,” Obama said to laughter from the crowd. Knowles nodded in agreement, recalling how she made hard decisions her daughters didn’t always understand in the moment — such as when she ended their second record deal and pulled them out of Atlanta after producers complained about her insistence on adult chaperones. When the girls once attended a party alone, breaking that rule, she was furious. The producers warned Knowles her girls would never make it if she didn’t ease up.
Decades later, Knowles’s fierce protection of Destiny’s Child and Solange now seems warranted, as the world confronts the abuse and exploitation she says she always sensed beneath the music industry’s glitz.
“I protected them,” she said simply to the crowd. “I didn’t let people do certain things around them. They couldn’t smoke weed in the studio, they couldn’t curse. Can you imagine my country self in there telling these producers, ‘I’m sorry, but can y’all not smoke in here?’”
She laughed as she recalled confronting a group of older male artists backstage at a Florida show after they made vulgar comments about the R&B group. “They said, ‘I’m going to take a picture with these [b—-s],’” she remembered. “And I was like, ‘I don’t see your mama out here.’”
When label reps warned her that the group she’d confronted had a violent reputation she didn’t flinch, she told the audience. “Well, they gonna have to shoot me, because they can’t talk to my girls like that.”
That same protective instinct extended beyond the studio walls and into her home. Knowles spoke at length about Johnny, her late gay nephew who died from complications of AIDS.
Johnny, whom Beyoncé refers to as “Uncle Johnny” is widely credited as the inspiration behind the singer’s 2022 “Renaissance” album.
“He affected my life more than anybody else in my life,” Knowles said. “He was my safe space, my creative partner, my joy.”
When Obama asked what she would say to family members struggling to accept their loved ones for who they are, Knowles didn’t hesitate. “Do you love them? Do you care about them?” she said. “Is the judgment more important than the relationship?”
The conversation shifted from memory to mortality as Knowles discussed how she nearly missed a life-changing diagnosis. A delayed mammogram, pushed aside by the pandemic chaos, uncovered early-stage cancer last year.
“I could have kept putting it off,” Knowles said. “And it could’ve been Stage 4.”
It was less a confession than a public service announcement. She said the best thing to come out of this book was the women who flooded her inbox on Instagram saying they just booked mammograms.
