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‘Beyoncé and Solange tell me off all the time’: Tina Knowles on raising superstars, surviving cancer and growing up under segregation

Pop’s top matriarch is finally getting the credit she’s due. She talks about her shock diagnosis, conspiracy theories about her family, and the Instagram posts that get her in trouble with her kids

Eventually, she decided: “I can still be respectful and not tell their story, but tell my story.” The result is her memoir Matriarch, a brilliant account of how a resilient little girl, born in terrible times, became a powerhouse, guiding her daughters to their potential without, it seems, all of them losing their sanity. There is no mention in the book of the 2014 incident in a lift after the Met Gala, where leaked CCTV footage showed Knowles’s younger daughter, Solange, attacking Beyoncé’s husband, the rapper Jay-Z, nor of his supposed infidelity. “They would rather stay home and listen to music and rehearse, and I just didn’t feel like it was as balanced as it should be.” Meanwhile, Mathew created a “boot camp”, as Knowles describes it in the book, taking the girls running and getting them to sing the whole time to increase their lung capacity so they could perform challenging choreography on stage.

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