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).
