Beyoncé's mum raised her daughters to win - her book explains how she did it

Tina Knowles offers a rare glimpse into a famous family in Matriarch’. Helen Brown explores the love, loss and trauma

- Helen Brown

“Mama, you’re a bad bitch!” Beyoncé and Solange Knowles told their mum, Tina, after she finally divorced their father Mathew, in 2011. Aged 58, the mother of two global megastar daughters was quitting her “addiction” to an unfaithful and impulsive man she describes in her richly atmospheric memoir, Matriarch, as “a gifted salesman”, a “torturer” and a “master apologiser” who ultimately “came up empty” for her.

As the “Mama Bear” who instilled such fierce feminism and Black pride in her daughters, it’s fascinating to read Knowles’ openhearted and insightful account of how she had unwittingly undervalued herself in a life spent building her own career, then supporting the careers of both her gifted children. It will also make readers wonder how much of this parental modelling Beyoncé absorbed, as she has also stuck by Jay-Z (despite calling out his dalliances with “side chicks”, including “Becky with the good hair” on her Lemonade album).

The 71-year-old mother knows better than to weigh in on any of that, heeding her daughter’s warning not to “spill too much tea” in her book and briefly praising Jay-Z as a cherished son-in-law. Instead of an insider gawp at her celebrity family, the Texan former hairdresser has written a complex, thoughtful and deeply absorbing family history which tracks her matrilineal line from slavery to superstardom. As a seamstress who made all her daughters’ early stage costumes, Knowles has a keen eye for both the overall shape of a tale and the tiny sensory details that will connect readers to it.