Tina Knowles is sharing details about her private breast cancer journey for the first time.
Ahead of the release of her new memoir, Matriarch, the 71-year-old mother of Beyoncé and Solange explained to several outlets that she missed a mammogram appointment at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and forgot to reschedule it until last year.
That’s when Ms. Tina’s doctors discovered two tumors—one benign, the other with Stage 1 cancer.
“I was diagnosed with breast cancer in my left breast,” Tina told Gayle King in a CBS Mornings interview recorded last month in Los Angeles. “I’ve always tried to take care of myself and I was in disbelief.”
“It was Stage 1, which I thought was the earliest stage. And then when I told my sister, she said, ‘No, actually there’s a zero.’ So if I had gone for my mammogram, I would have got it at the zero stage. Thank God it was still very small, [it] hadn’t spread. It was a very slow spreading cancer.”
On the day of her successful surgery to remove the tumor, she was joined by her daughters at the hospital. She was cheered up by Solange pulling up TikToks from creator Jools Lebron, who infamously coined the phrase “very mindful, very demure.”
Ms. Tina would later get on a video call with Lebron to thank her for laughs before inviting the creator to her book tour stop in Chicago.
Although her ex-husband Mathew Knowles carries the BRCA2 gene and is a breast cancer survivor himself, Tina told People in a separate interview she does not have the gene and there’s no family history of the disease.
Elsewhere in the People interview, she described her daughters’ reactions to her diagnosis. Bey, she explained, “took it well, staying positive, and I could already feel her mind racing, focusing on this as a task to tackle with precision.”
Solange, for her part, simply said, “Mom, we are going to take care of this,” Knowles recalled.
These days, Tina says she’s “doing great, cancer-free and incredibly blessed that God allowed me to find it early.”
“I want to give people hope,” she added. “What scares me now is not making the best of every day that I have left in this life.”
However, Ms. Tina says the terrifying health ordeal almost didn’t make it into her memoir.
“I struggled with whether I would share that journey [in the book] because I’m very private. But I decided to share it because I think it’s a lot of lessons in it for other women,” she told People. “And I think as women, sometimes we get so busy and we get so wrapped up and running around, but you must go get your test. Because if I had not gotten my test early, I mean, I shudder to think what could have happened to me.”
Tina Knowles’ memoir Matriarch is available now wherever books are sold.
