Becoming a Matriarch
A Memoir
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Becoming a Matriarch
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Narrated by:
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Helen Knott
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By:
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Helen Knott
About this listen
Co-winner of the 2024 George Ryga Award for Social Awareness in Literature
Winner of the Jim Deva Prize for Writing That Provokes (part of the BC and Yukon Book Prizes)
Shortlisted for the 2024 Hubert Evans Non-Fiction Prize
Finalist for the 2024 Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction
Shortlisted for the 2025 OLA Evergreen Award
When matriarchs begin to disappear, there is a choice to either step into the places they left behind, or to craft a new space.
Helen Knott’s debut memoir, In My Own Moccasins, wowed reviewers, award juries, and readers alike with its profoundly honest and moving account of addiction, intergenerational trauma, resilience, and survival. Now, in her highly anticipated second book, Knott returns with a chronicle of grief, love, and legacy.
Having lost both her mom and grandmother in just over six months, forced to navigate the fine lines between matriarchy, martyrdom, and codependency, Knott realizes she must let go, not just of the women who raised her, but of the woman she thought she was.
Woven into the pages are themes of mourning, sobriety through loss, and generational dreaming. Becoming a Matriarch is charted with poetic insights, sass, humour, and heart, taking the reader over the rivers and mountains of Dane Zaa territory in Northeastern British Columbia, along the cobbled streets of Antigua, Guatemala, and straight to the heart of what matriarchy truly means. This is a journey through pain, on the way to becoming.©2023 Helen Knott (P)2023 Knopf Canada
Critic reviews
A GLOBE AND MAIL BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
ONE OF CBC’S BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR
ONE OF INDIGO’S TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR
“Becoming a Matriarch is about the work of carving out a ‘beautiful space’ in a life where freedom and love can flourish. Helen Knott tells the story of the women in her family pushing up against the boundaries of gender, race, and class and, in so doing, Knott shows us that another way of living is possible. Her sentences are poetic and dazzling; they are little anchors the grieving can fasten themselves to—readers will surely return to them again and again.” —Billy-Ray Belcourt, author of A Minor Chorus
“In enchantingly vivid language and with a compelling narrative arc, Helen Knott’s new masterpiece is a memoir of grief and joy, loss and rediscovery, flight and return and, above all, a paean to the beautiful, eternal, soothing and all-encompassing power of matriarchy.” —Gabor Maté MD, author of The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture
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