notes on a celebrity: hilary duff rules...now

I’m going to be positive this time and talk about a celebrity that doesn’t suck, but for a long time, I fucking hated.

And that’s Hilary Duff.

Hilary Erhard Duff and I are the same age; in fact, I’m something like ~five weeks older than her, which means we would have been in different “classes” (or grades) (most likely; I was ‘young’ for my grade, being born in August). I mention that for both context-setting and as a possible explanation for why I hated her so much.

When we, that is, Duff and I, were 14 years old, she got her big break playing Lizzie McGuire in the Disney Channel original series Lizzie McGuire. Lizzie ran from 2001 to 2004, the majority of my high school years. I didn’t watch Lizzie McGuire because I was poor and we didn’t have the Disney Channel, though we did as young kids, which means my “Disney Channel original” memories are fever dreams of a giant 1980s era Minnie Mouse singing a duet with a closeted Elton John, or the animatronic Mother Goose Stories that reminded me of my, also animatronic, Mother Goose doll that read me stories at night as she cricked her weird little neck.

But by the time the true MiLlEnNiAl core memories, as we know them now, were birthed, I wasn’t involved. I didn’t watch “Disney Channel Original Movies, save for Wish Upon a Star, which must have been available to rent for .99 cents at the video store. To this day, I’ve never seen an episode of Lizzie McGuire, and any storyline I think I know from the show actually came from my best friend’s little sister’s fanfiction, which we read a lot of. Not necessarily to be mean or make fun of her (though maybe), but even so, it backfired because her fan fic was good!

The truth is, I don’t know why I hated Hilary Duff. I mean, I don’t think she was a very good actress — I didn’t watch Lizzie, but I watched Cheaper by the Dozen and its sequel, and I watched like, Agent Cody Banks because what else was I doing in 2003, and I liked Frankie Muniz. We did have a lot of good millennial actresses like Amanda Bynes (legitimately a great comedian), Lindsay Lohan and Raven Symone (legitimately great actresses), the Olsen twins (I think? good actresses but certainly talented in a lot of ways), and I just don’t think Duff lived up to the extremely talented bar they set. I don’t think she was a very good actress, but that’s an intense reason to have hated her.