Hilary Duff has opened up about one of the most painful things she has ever shared publicly: she is estranged not just from her sister Haylie, but from her parents as well.
In a new interview on the On Purpose with Jay Shetty podcast, the 38-year-old actress and musician confirmed that she and Haylie, 41, are not in contact and that the family rift runs deeper than most people realized.
“My sister and I don’t speak,” Hilary said plainly. “And I think in my adulthood I’ve come across more and more people that are having this experience.”
She wrote a song about it. We Don’t Talk appears on her new album luck…or something, released February 20, 2026, her first album in a decade.
The fact that she chose to put the estrangement at the center of her long-awaited return to music tells you how much it has defined her recent years.
“As painful as it feels to share, when I decided to make this record, I could only talk about the things that I’ve gone through,” she said.
“Like there would be no purpose to make a record after 10 years than to face what it’s been like. That’s my truth.”
The Rift Is Bigger Than Haylie
What makes this story more complex than a simple sister falling-out is that Hilary has revealed the estrangement extends to her parents as well.
The family rift, as she has described it in multiple recent interviews, is not confined to one relationship, it appears to have fractured her original family unit more broadly.
She has been careful throughout to speak only from her own perspective, making clear she is not trying to attack anyone.
“I really worked hard to lyrically make sure that I’m just speaking about my experience,” she said on the podcast. “I’m not trying to say anything bad. It’s literally just my experience.”
That restraint makes what she is saying land harder, not softer. She is not raging. She is grieving.
“It’s a very raw part of my existence,” she said of the estrangement. “I hope it’s not forever, but it’s for right now.”
What Hilary Said In February
This is not the first time Hilary has spoken about the rift. In February 2026, she appeared on CBS Mornings and became emotional discussing her relationship with Haylie.
Host Anthony Mason asked her directly whether she hoped Haylie would hear the song We Don’t Talk.
“I don’t think that that would help,” Hilary replied. “I think I have to just exist as a person on my own and do what I want to do.”
She added:
“I hope that for everyone that is where I’m sitting — you have to do what you want to do and you have to do what feels good for you. It’s taken me a lot of time to get there and to live that way and to not care what the noise is going to be around it and just be me.”
In that same interview she called the estrangement the “most lonely part of my existence.”
In the Jay Shetty podcast she returned to the question of how Haylie might respond to the song.
“I don’t know how she’ll react to it,” she said. “But it is a really personal part of my life that doesn’t get to stay personal, so I might as well say how it is for me as an experience. That’s all I’m trying to do.”
Who Are Hilary And Haylie Duff?
Hilary Duff rose to fame as a teenager playing Lizzie McGuire on Disney Channel from 2001 to 2004 — a role that made her one of the most recognizable young actresses in America.
She transitioned into music with a series of successful pop albums in the early 2000s, including Metamorphosis in 2003, which went quadruple platinum.
She later built a sustained acting career as an adult, most notably starring in the TV Land series Younger from 2015 to 2021.
Haylie Duff is three years older than Hilary and also built a career in entertainment, acting in various television series and films throughout the 2000s.
The two sisters appeared close for many years, Haylie was a fixture in Hilary’s public life and the two were frequently photographed together.
That the estrangement has happened, and that it apparently also involves their parents, represents a significant fracture in a family that presented a very different image for a very long time.
Hilary is now married to musician Matthew Koma, with whom she has three daughters, Banks, Mae, and Townes. She also has a son, Luca, from her first marriage to hockey player Mike Comrie.
She has spoken about the particular weight of navigating family estrangement while raising children of her own.
What Is Her Next Album Is About?
luck… or something is Hilary’s first album in ten years and by all accounts her most personal.
She has described it as a record she could only make once she stopped worrying about what people would think, which is perhaps why it took a decade.
The songs deal with the estrangement from her family, the complexity of her private life, and the kind of emotional honesty that requires genuine courage to put on record.
We Don’t Talk is the song that has generated the most conversation — for obvious reasons.
But the fact that Hilary chose to write it, record it, and then speak about it repeatedly in major interviews suggests she made a deliberate decision: if this is going to be her truth, she is going to own it fully rather than hint around the edges.
“I could only talk about the things that I’ve gone through,” she said. She did.
