Hilary Duff’s Music Comeback Healed My First-Concert Heartbreak (and My Inner Child)

I was only 9 years old when I got my first taste of concert heartbreak, at the hands of Hilary Duff and my mother.

At least, that was how I saw it at the time. Hilary was on tour, making a stop in my hometown of San Diego. Like every other millennial girl, I was obsessed with her. I vividly remember playing Metamorphosis on repeat on my bedroom boombox, wearing out the liner notes to memorize the lyrics, queuing up “Come Clean” at the first speck of rain outside my window. Lizzie McGuire, Agent Cody Banks, Cadet Kelly… Everything Hilary touched won Oscars and went platinum in my household.

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So I was consumed by jealousy when it was my older sister Lexie, not me, who got invited to Hilary’s show. I begged my mom to let me go too, though in retrospect, there wasn’t much she could have done — did the invite even extend to Lexie’s tagalong younger sister? Seems unlikely. But at age 9, you believe your mother has the ultimate power to make or break your deepest desires, so when she told me I couldn’t go, my child’s sense of justice demanded that she receive the silent treatment for at least a day in punishment.

I used this time to create a homemade Hilary poster via Microsoft Word on our home desktop. A wavy blue ClipArt title was involved (something like “Hilary Duff, the best singer ever!!”) along with five of the highest-quality 480p images of Hilary that Google Images could provide. I tacked it up in my room, where it stayed for at least three years to serve the dual purpose of fueling my fandom and inducing guilt in my mother (with questionable success). It was all extremely serious and dramatic. My sister did get me a very cool Hilary Duff lanyard-and-photo card souvenir, which made it all a little bit better. Yes, I still have it, and yes, it is still hanging in my New York City apartment to this day.

The moral of this story, for parents, is not to just give in when your child begs you to take them to a pop concert. (Especially given ticket prices these days. Dear God.) The moral of this story is to simply ensure that your child pursues a career path that offers them the opportunity to see said artist 21 years later on her sold-out comeback tour, thus healing their inner child.

This is obviously not the moral either, but it is actually what happened. After years of successfully continuing my Hilary Duff fandom, including purchasing the rest of her albums up through With Love (don’t judge me, I did stream Breathe In. Breathe Out.!) and loving her turns in A Cinderella Story, Cheaper By the Dozen and Raise Your Voice, I mentioned my tragic 2004 story at just the right time in just the right work meeting and finagled my way into a suite at Hilary’s Brooklyn concert last night. Mind you, I’m a health editor, so I wasn’t exactly within my beat.

It was like a millennial pop culture playground. There was the Spotify-hosted pre-party where we did glittery makeup and put butterfly clips in our hair, and reps showed us how to use their fancy new Prompted Playlist feature, where Spotify curates personalized playlists for you based on a prompt of your creation. (I’ve come very far from my childhood boombox days.) At the packed show, Hilary ran through her biggest hits in a sparkly crop-top and slacks. There were times I had trouble hearing her singing, because the crowd was so loud. I was far from the only one there who knew all the words.

The millennial nostalgia trend gets quite a bit of flack, and I do get it. Disney adults are pretty widely ridiculed online, on January 27, the New York Times Opinion section published an article titled “The Harry Potter Generation Needs to Grow Up.” Even as Gen Z becomes more fascinated with millennial culture — the recent trend of reposting 2016 content, the renaissance of low-rise jeans and hair clips, the obsession with early-2000s TV shows and rom-coms… I could go on — there’s an intolerance for millennials who lean too hard into their childhood joys.

Hilary Duff seems to stand outside of all that. Even as a lifelong fan, I was honestly (but pleasantly!) surprised to see what a massive response she got when she announced her music comeback. The mood in the venue was nothing short of euphoric, triumphantly millennial. Hilary looked amazing and sounded even better, confessing to nerves and awe at the sight and sound of the crowd. And it seemed that all anyone could talk about was how we knew every lyric, and how we had missed seeing her live or thought we never would.

So part of it was nostalgia, the fulfillment of childhood dreams for those of us who were (cruelly!) denied the opportunity to see Hilary live in her mid-2000s heyday. I think it’s also that she’s one of those celebrities who we feel we’ve grown up with, who somehow nailed the impossible transition from Disney child star to mature actress and beloved pop singer, while finding true love and having adorable children along the way — but not without some bumps in the road, from divorce to the failed revival of Lizzie McGuire. Even those somehow served to make her more likable: an ended marriage is nothing if not relatable, and the show didn’t come to fruition because, in Hilary’s words, it would have been a “disservice” to the character we all love so much. She’s just like us, and she’s as protective of our favorite show as we are.

“I keep seeing you guys on the Internet saying the most lovely things about this being a healing experience,” she said, near the end of the show last night, “but I truly think it’s for me. I think I’m being healed.” And then she sang “Why Not,” and we plunged back into ecstasy.

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