growing up with hilary duff

CONTENT NOTE: This essay contains references to adult themes that may be sensitive for some readers, including sex, age-gap relationships and war.

Like most Millennials, I was raised on Hilary Duff. From her breakout role as a relatable tween in Disney’s Lizzie McGuire, to her iconic film roles, Barbie collaborations, clothing lines and, of course, her music. From the moment I saw her two-second dance break to “Santa Claus Lane” on Movie Surfers, I was all-in on Hilary as a pop girl. Over the years, my fandom would become a full-on obsession. Alongside fellow Y2K icons Britney Spears, and Mary-Kate and Ashley, Hilary was one of my special interests for the majority of the early 2000s, and as this website proves, I’ve never gotten over any of them.

Hilary’s latest album, luck ... or something, proves that I was right to keep stanning even when the gays let “Sparks” flop. Her journey to creating the album and my journey as a fan happened alongside shifts in technology, culture and an entire generation’s coming of age. ~*In this essay,*~ I will discuss online fandom, my journey with Hilary Duff’s music, my thoughts on luck ..., losing my virginity to a man 13 years older than me and war.

The internet, online fandom and Hilary’s early music

Hilary’s stardom came right around the time the internet was becoming more mainstream. Hilary was one of the first celebrities I looked up online and at first, her website was just a simple black and pink landing page. My fandom would define a lot of my early days on the internet. I was pretty active on a couple of different fan forums, and even became fairly known for making forum signatures for other members on one of them. One of my many early attempts to create my own website on AOL Hometown was mostly an excuse to review of her true debut album (Holiday records shouldn’t count) Metamorphosis. I pretended that I was merely curious about what the album would sound like because it had so much hype.

As obsessed with HIlary as I was, I knew it wasn’t cool to listen to her music when most of my friends were listening to Linkin Park and Evanescence, so I tried really hard to sound snarky and aloof on my own website. Any credibility I was trying to establish was betrayed by the fact that I claimed in my review that “the album is shockingly... good?” It’s especially funny, because it was never a question whether I would like the new Hilary Duff album. I had played the Santa Clause Lane CD (which I’m pretty sure my grandmother had to open a new credit card to buy me) on loop all Christmas.

Metamorphosis was no different. For weeks after the album came out, I’d listen to it in full before bed while reading the lyrics in the booklet. I legitimately found strength and inspiration in a lot of the songs. “Working It Out” helped me deal with bullying I was experiencing in school, “Love Just Is” made me (foolishly) believe that my crush might actually like me back, “Inner Strength” gave me the faith to believe that I didn’t need anyone else to be worthy and the classic “Why Not” defined the type of happy-go-lucky optimism that still guides my outlook on life today. Metamorphosis gave me messages I needed to hear when I was younger. But even then, I knew it wasn’t “serious” music.

I still find a lot of enjoyment in Hilary’s old music. As much as I’ve outgrown a lot of the juvenile themes, I appreciate her early tracks as well-crafted pop songs. I can even still relate to songs like “So Yesterday” or “Why Not” when the I need the type of teen-movie-delulu mood-boost only bubblegum pop can provide. But even in all my nostalgia-pilled arrested development, I would never call most of Hilary’s early music serious.

But Hilary does have some true gems in her discography — she found a lane with 80s-inspired dance music on tracks like “Wake Up,” “Beat of My Heart” and her critically-acclaimed 2007 album Dignity, which is legitimately a pop/dance masterpiece, despite the cringey viral “With Love” dance break; she has songs that sample iconic tracks from Depeche Mode and Belinda Carlise (“Reach Out” and “Confetti”) in sufficiently fun ways; “Sparks” is famously underrated — and her latest album is her best yet.

On ‘luck ... or something’ and losing my virginity to an older man

luck ... or something is cohesive, catchy and confessional. Like the sugary sweet pop-rock of her earliest work, it can be a little too saccharine — but even the sappiest songs are undeniably well-crafted. Only now, the songs aren’t being crafted by a group of hit-making songwriters and the latest pop producers — Hilary wrote every track with her husband Matthew Koma, who also produced the record. Because of that, it feels like her first real attempt at making “serious” music and, in my opinion, it succeeds.

Hilary’s involvement is apparent from the extremely personal lyrics, which touch on disillusionment, paranoia and anxiety over her marriage; estranged and strained relationships with family members; and — fittingly for a former teen idol’s comeback album — the type of perspective that only comes with age, from rethinking an age-gap relationship to experiencing existential ennui as middle-age approaches.

For all of us who grew up with Hilary, these themes are incredibly meaningful. As others have observed, Hilary’s appeal has always been her down-to-earth relatability. Hearing our teen queen sing about the same fears, uncertainties and difficulties so many of us have experienced in adulthood gives us the same comfort we got from watching her work through relatable pre-teen dillemmas on Lizzie McGuire — who can forget the iconic bra episode — and in her early music.

The context of Hilary’s career also gives the album’s coming-of-age theme a special meta resonance that adds an almost post-modern charm to tracks that might otherwise be mid — the Blink-182 sample on “Growing Up” might be uninspired if not for the fact that the song was originally released the month the teen-star-to-be turned 10 years-old. As interesting as the deeply-personal lyrics are, this meta narrative is, for me, one of the most compelling aspects of the album.

But the album is meaningful to me personally in other ways. The lead single has a darkly funny significance for me which, in the spirit of Hilary’s raw lyrics on the record, I feel moved to share. “Mature” finds Hilary looking back on a past age-gap relationship through new eyes. A huge part of my lore is that the first time I really had sex was with a man 13 years older than me, who I met on Craigslist shortly after I turned 18. Like, it’s not like a big deal — like it is, but it is what it is; we don’t gotta’ get into it — but I definitely relate to looking back on that and feeling differently about it now than I did when I was younger.

But the funny part is that — aside from the fact that I kicked the guy in the eye when we tried to 69 — when we finished, we were cuddling and flipping channels on the hotel TV, as you do (yes, it was a hotel because I’m a classy lady), and I made him stop when I saw Material Girls playing on VH1. I thought I was such an adult for having sex, but then I tried to make this grown man watch a Hilary Duff movie with me. Which, on the one hand, is kind of dark and sad. Like, I was still so young. But I do genuinely find it hilarious. If I feel any negativity over the short fling we had, it’s that he didn’t let me finish the movie. Even though when I finally watched it years later, I didn’t think it was that great.

But luck ... or something is genuinely good album. The Every Single Album podcast found some of the lyrics a little too confessional, comparing some of the more emotionally-charged songs to trauma-dumping after too many martinis. Which not to be that girl, but that feels misogynistic. When men write heart-wrenching songs, they’re praised for being vulnerable, raw and incisive. But Hilary is painted as an overly-emotional wine mom? Please.

If anything, a still-present teen-pop-adjacent sheen keeps some songs from hitting as hard as they could — “the optimist” is absolutely devastating in the best way, and it could fully pass for an Elliot Smith track if it had less polished production and vocal processing. And yet, that pop sensibility is part of the appeal. Like a good glass of wine can make some conversations go smoother, Hilary’s signature sweetness is the spoonful of sugar you need to explore such difficult emotions without getting weighed down by them.

It also helps that — in true teen pop fashion — Hilary ends the album on a hopeful note. The final track, “Adult Size Medium”, finds Hilary reflecting on her youth — how she’s changed, youthful illusions she’s letting go of and the memories that would fade away in their wake if she didn’t hold them so close after all these years. “I’m waking up to a dream sequence / Sometimes I can’t see me in it ... I remember everything and nothing at all ... how did we get here?” Despite everything she’s experienced over the years, she nevertheless finds that “the twenty year-old me’s still in here.”

In many ways, that’s the thesis statement of the record — and it sends a powerful message. luck ... is Hilary’s most mature album, in both sound and subject matter. But as much as Hilary has matured and changed, it is indeed the same qualities — of her personality and her music — that made her such an appealing teen star that make this recent release resonate. It’s not just nostalgia — her brave, bold exploration of her internal life mirrors the type of unhinhibited self-expression (and perhaps self-centeredness) that comes easier when you’re younger and not so guarded; the kind that most adults indeed need a couple of happy hour drinks in order to access.

Growing up, doing inner work and war

With her latest album, Hilary invites her now-grown fans to once again embrace the type of innocent self-expression that defined her earliest music. Listening to the album can sort of feel like — to use Millennial therapy speak — doing inner-child work. I first listened to the album as I was cooking dinner — a major milestone for me because hashtag adulting is hard — and tidying up the apartment I moved into at the beginning of the year — the nicest place I’ve ever lived — and when “the optimist” came on, I cried. Later, I listened to it on my new clear personal CD player as I journaled under my color-change LED light and I felt both like a kid again and like I was living in my younger self’s imagined future. Nothing’s changed and everything has changed.

Metamorphosis came out just months after the United States invaded Iraq in response to the September 11 attacks two years earlier. At the time, I had no idea what that meant nor did I care. About a week after luck ... or something was released, the current conflict in Iran began, which made me feel silly for caring about relatively inconsequential things like pop music or my emotions. I care about the state the world a lot more now, and I’m somewhat more informed. I listened to the album partially in search of nostalgic joy and escapism, and it did provide some of that, but the unexpectedly heavy themes triggered more bittersweet emotions. And the irony of the fact that all these years later, our world is facing many of the same problems we always have was not lost on me.

Yet, I feel like I have personally come so far over the more than two decades that have passed since I first sat down at my computer to write about Hilary Duff’s music. The world is as crazy as ever, but even among the chaos, a pop star can stage a triumphant comeback; I can start a new job and move into a new apartment and write about my feelings about my life about music like any of it matters.

I hesitated to bring up the war, worried it was pretentious or overwrought. That younger, insecure version of me that tried to mask my Hilary Duff fandom — that sought validation from men online — is still in the back of my mind, worried writing any of this at all is cringe. That critical voice, and the fact that I’m still obsessed with the same celebrities I loved as a teen, makes me wonder if I’ve actually grown or changed at all. But the fact that I’m writing honestly about these things, without defensive irony, proves that I have. And that makes it feel like everything matters.

Published on: April 5, 2026

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