The Biggest Family Bombshells From Tina Knowles' Book Matriarch

Pregnant Solange Got Super Mad When Tina Knowles Tried to Stop Her From Getting Married at 17

Tina Knowles worried that Solange Knowles was “too young” for motherhood when her younger daughter got pregnant at 17, she wrote in her 2025 book Matriarch. But while the grandmother-to-be supported Solange’s decision to have the baby, she encouraged her not to get married just yet—and tried to get the baby’s father, Daniel Smith, to try to convince Solange to wait as well.

Daniel “called us back, crying,’” Tina wrote. “[Solange] said, F--k you, and f--k my mama, and f--k Angie [Beyincé, Tina’s niece] because I know they put you up to this.’ Solange hung up in his face, and then disappeared for two days. We were scared to death, and even if a disappearing act was always Solange’s way, I was so mad.”

Solange had son Julez Smith and married Daniel in 2004, with her family in attendance, but they divorced in 2007.

Beyoncé’s Name Is a Beautiful Mistake

Speaking of Angie Beyince, Tina’s niece ended up with that last name because Tina and her siblings all spelled their last name differently. It just so happened that Tina’s birth certificate read “Celestine Ann Beyoncé.”

Which, Tina recalled in Matriarch, she wanted to change. Sitting with her brother Larry one night as he did his homework, she wrote, “I said I wanted to practice my own name, so he let me borrow his pencil and said each letter for me.” When they got to her last name, Larry had to think for a second.

“He reminded me that all of us kids had difference spellings of our parents’ last name, Buyince,” she wrote. “There was Beyince, Boyance, and mine, Beyoncé.”

When she demanded that her mother Agnéz do something about her misspelled birth certificate, Tina continued, “I was told, ‘Be happy that you’re getting a birth certificate.’ Because, at one time, Black people didn’t even get birth certificates.” Besides, Agnéz added, “’Your name is beautiful.’”

Obviously the name grew on her, because Tina named her eldest child Beyoncé. “It didn’t matter how it was spelled when it was given to me, it was our name,” Tina wrote. “Our history. The most valuable possession I had, and it was now mine to give. I’ve kept a word going.”

Tina Knowles Felt “Helpless” During Beyoncé Pregnancy Rumors

Beyoncé suffered multiple miscarriages before she and Jay-Z welcomed daughter Blue Ivy Carter in 2012. And subsequent rumors started by “awful people” that the “Halo” singer had faked her pregnancy, her bump wasn’t real, etc., really ground Tina’s gears.

That was “some of the stupidest s—t," Tina wrote. “I wanted to curse some people out and scream at these losers to set the record straight. They had no idea what she and Jay, and our whole family, had been through. It was one of the worst times that Beyoncé would not allow me to speak publicly.”

In hindsight, she thinks Beyoncé was right not to dignify any of the bogus stories with a response.

Still, Tina wrote, “As a mother, the constant rumors make me feel helpless, unable to protect my children. I can work on anything else that comes about, but rumors? It feels out of my control.”

Beyoncé’s Mom Tina Knowles Didn’t Think Divorce Was an Option Amid Husband Mathew Knowles’ Infidelity

“We were so good half the time,” Tina wrote of her relationship with Beyoncé and Solange’s dad, Mathew Knowles, whom she married in 1980. But despite their “cosmic kind of love,” his “erratic behavior would take hold.”

She continued, “He would cheat or act up, and I would say I’d had enough. He’d beg for forgiveness, crying and promising to get better.” And then he would get better, but “the same thing would happen again,” Tina wrote. “But this is what married people did, I told myself.”

Tina was also unsure she could make it on her own, not having worked since becoming a mom, wondering, “If I left him, what then?”

By the time she was pregnant with Solange, who was born in 1986, Tina wrote, “the marriage was deteriorating faster than I could possibly find ways or reasons to make it work—even with the pregnancy. Mathew’s infidelity became so out there for all to see that I could not possibly stay in the marriage.”

Mathew was a “wonderful father,” she noted, “But he had issues that did not make for a good husband then.”

In response to speculation that some of Beyoncé’s sharpest Lemonade lyrics were referencing her dad, Mathew said he could only wonder along with everybody else.

“I don't know who she was referring to throughout the whole series,” he told Mark Thompson on SiriusXM’s Make It Plain in April 2016. “I can only speak of being a proud father. I think Beyoncé pushed the envelope of creativity on this HBO special."

Asked specifically about her opening chapter, “Intuition”—“You remind me of my father, a magician. Able to exist in two places at once. In the tradition of men in my blood, you come home at 3 a.m. and lie to me”—Mathew said he had “no reaction.”

“I know the response you want to get,” he told Mark. “You’re not going to get that response.”

Tina Knowles Couldn't Quit Ex-Husband Mathew Knowles Right Away

In 2009, Tina filed for divorce from her husband of 29 years after finding out he had fathered a child outside their marriage.

“This was different from the other times I had chosen to leave him. Now I had no choice,” she wrote in Matriarch of going apes--t when Mathew was served with paternity papers on Oct. 2, 2009, when Beyoncé was being honored as Billboard’s Woman of the Year. “The aftermath of that explosion, I kept pace with my life, and I had now for years, sticking to my routine and allowing work to numb and carry me.”

But Mathew continued to woo her, she wrote, and “as he courted me, I found myself falling in love again.”

Which is how she ended up in a situationship with her own spouse.

One that she couldn’t tell their daughters Beyoncé and Solange about, Tina wrote, because she “knew the kids would be so mad at us if they found out we were back together.”

The kids inevitably caught on when they showed up at Tina’s house on Mother’s Day in 2010 to surprise her. Bey, the oldest, “solemnly nodded,” Tina wrote, while Solange “exploded” out of a sense of protectiveness.

“They each loved their dad in different ways,” Tina wrote, “and I sometimes felt my youngest was so much like her dad that she felt his moments of failing on a soul-deep level.”

Divorce proceedings got back on track and were finalized in 2011. Mathew (who’s also dad to a son and daughter, both born in 2010, with respective ex-girlfriends) has been married to Gena Knowles since 2013.

Tina Knowles’ Second Divorce Wasn’t Dramatic

Tina went on to marry Richard Lawson in 2015 but filed for divorce in 2023.

Unlike with her first husband, however, Tina’s second marriage didn’t end over some big betrayal.

She and Richard were “friends for many years before our 10-year relationship,” she explained in Matriarch, “and he has great qualities, we just didn’t bring them out in each other. I just grew up at 69 and realized I deserved so much more. I wanted to be happy. I wanted someone to be happy when I walked in the room.”

Tina wrote that she made the decision to divorce Richard “totally without malice.”

Beyoncé’s Mom Stayed With Her After Breast Cancer Surgery

Tina underwent a lumpectomy after being diagnosed with stage 1 breast cancer in 2024. And not only did Beyoncé, Solange, Angie and Kelly Rowland show up for her at the hospital, Beyoncé took Tina home with her and stayed looped in with her mom’s doctor.

“Beyoncé made me move into her house so she could supervise my recuperation,” Tina wrote, “exactly as my mother or I would have done.”