Tina Knowles is a renowned businesswoman, designer and now a best-selling author.
Her memoir “Matriarch” is number one on the New York Times’ bestsellers list, a feat she never expected when she released it last month.
Knowles talked to the KTLA 5 Morning News just hours after she joined her daughter Beyoncé, and her granddaughters Blue Ivy and Rumi on the stage of the Cowboy Carter Tour show at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood on Thursday night.
“From that perspective, I’m always either behind stage or out there in the audience, so it was really fun. And being with my daughter and my granddaughters, it was the best!” she gushed.
While her eldest is constantly changing the game in music, she still asks Mama T for advice.
“She’s a grown woman, so she has her own opinions about things, but she does ask my advice on a lot of things, and she values it,” she explained. “I’m always in awe of her, not only her talent, but just the amount of, you know, she’s a boss, and she is involved in every detail of her career, every detail of the show, it’s mind boggling to watch her work. But, as she does all of this and still manages to be a great mom and great daughter and do really great things as a human, you know, that’s (what I’m) proud of.”
Family is Knowles’ foundation and something the family has always centered, even when she was a child growing up in Galveston, Texas. She makes it known in her book by paying homage to her ancestors. She even includes her family tree, starting with her great-great-grandparents and leading up to her grandchildren.
Knowles also has two grandsons, Daniel Julez J. Smith, 20, from her youngest daughter, Solange, and Sir Carter,7, from Beyoncé.
For the project, she partnered with Ancestry.com to take a deep look into her roots.
She was already knowledgeable of her family’s history as her mother had taught her early on about her bloodline. However, she found the family tree important because the “book reads like a novel” and there are so many “characters.”
It was also something Oprah Winfrey had advised as well.
“She said, ‘Girl, but it’s too many characters you need to do a tree,'” she laughed. “I was just going to do the outline of it, because I think that is so important. And what I’m hoping from this book, people get the idea to write their own story, not for publication, but just for your great-grandchildren. I might (not) meet them, because my children didn’t meet my mother and I didn’t meet my grandmother. So I was already recording into a phone so that I could leave that for my, you know, for my descendants, so that hear it from my words.”
Knowles is also going on tour herself, her book tour “An Evening with Tina Knowles, Family & Friends.”
“It’s my own little tour,” she said of the nine-city tour. “I’m really excited to see people come out and hear the story, and also to just get inspired by many of the things that I’ve learned, I’ve tried to pass on, and information that can help people and share.”
Keke Palmer is moderating the show at The Wiltern in Los Angeles on May 2.
“It’s going to be a good time with Keke Palmer, who is so hilarious. Oh, we love her. Jennifer Hudson is going to honor us with a song,” she continued. “So I’m very excited about tonight. All people will come out and join us!”
Tickets are available here.
