Tina Knowles is opening up about her personal battle with breast cancer for the first time.
Before the launch of her new memoir, Matriarch, Beyoncé and Solange’s 71-year-old mom told several media outlets that she skipped a mammogram appointment during the peak of COVID-19 and didn’t remember to book another one until last year.
That’s when doctors found two tumors in Ms. Tina’s breast—one harmless, the other diagnosed as Stage 1 cancer.
“I was diagnosed with breast cancer in my left breast,” Tina revealed to Gayle King during a CBS Mornings interview filmed 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, her daughters were by her side at the hospital. Solange helped lift her spirits by showing her TikToks from creator Jools Lebron, who famously came up with the phrase “very mindful, very demure.”
Ms. Tina later video called Lebron to thank her for the laughs before inviting the creator to join her book tour stop in Chicago.
Even though her ex-husband Mathew Knowles carries the BRCA2 gene and has survived breast cancer himself, Tina told People in another interview that she doesn’t have the gene and there’s no family history of the disease in her lineage.
In the People interview, she also described how her daughters reacted to her diagnosis. Beyoncé, 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 simply stated, “Mom, we are going to take care of this,” Knowles remembered.
Now, 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.”
Interestingly, Ms. Tina reveals the frightening health crisis almost didn’t make it into her book.
“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.
