Nikki Sixx

A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star

The Heroin Diaries

Honestly as amazing as they say. As someone who’s not a motley fan - I’m love it. I was so caught up in finishing it. Ultimate rock and roll memoir with so many life lessons. Gritty and raw.

Madison Aumua

Bad Girl Bex

Thank god thats over. This book was quite the slog to get through; not because it was particularly long or at all difficult to comprehend...but because it was so repetitive. What's that? You're a rock star and you take loads of drugs? Wow, that's unique. Never heard about that before. Oh, you say you take it to the absolute limit of excess? Uh-huh...cool story bro. Whatever. 

I'm not trying to say that Nikki (or the rest of the band) weren't the "most outrageously debauched band out there", because they were obviously a bunch of tossers who got paid an outrageous amount of money to play some fucking awful music to their fans, all around the world...and they needed to live up to their rock-star reputations by spending lots of that money on something. You can only crash so many motor vehicles before that thrill starts to wear off and inevitably look for something more powerful to satisfy your demands.

But listening to druggies tell the same story time after time, doesn't impress me. It doesn't even shock me. It just ends up boring me. So you played a show, snorted a load of coke, screwed some groupies and then got into a fight because you're an annoying, entitled, rock star and don't seem to know what else you could be doing with your time? Yeah...you said that already. Oh and please, can you stop telling the same story about how whenever you smoke crack you end up cowering in your closet because you think people are coming to get you? I mean, it was sort of funny the first time I heard it, but after the third time it just sounds mundane.

And before anyone comes at me and tries to explain to me that Nikki wasn't trying to glorify his drug use...or that he really just wanted to be able to help someone else who was going through what he did. I get it. He cleaned up (with the odd slip) by the end of the book and then did what every boring addict does once they get clean: he became a boring addict, no longer using, who now wants to wax lyrical about the beauty of sobriety and how "spiritual" the whole experience was. YAWN!

I pretty much hated this book all the way through. Not just because the repetitive antics written in Nikki's journal were getting so old and trite, I might as well have been reading the diary of some edgy little emo kid who thinks he invented wearing black eyeliner and self harm; but also because of the way it was put together. It starts of by introducing a "cast" of people who will feature throughout the book - mostly the other band members, management, family & ex girlfriends - and then after a diary entry is presented, it then has a big chunk of commentary from whichever "cast member" was involved in it. So it goes from reading Nikki's diary to then getting another person to comment on the entry/contradict it if it was wrong/verify it...and that's really disjointed. 

I like to read the diaries/journals of other people because it's fascinating to see not just what was going on in a person's head throughout their lives, but also what they chose to write down, ruminate on, or rant about. The reader also gets to see how one day's entry differs or relates to the previous one, as we move through the entries mostly undistracted by additional commentary. Sure, I understand that point Nikki was trying to make; his diary is written from only his perspective, so it's bound to be a little biased or exaggerated or played down, depending on how he feels about what's going on. And he sort of ties this all up at the end, by saying now y'all can see how I was a troubled kid, a messed up young man and was confused by so many lies and versions of the truth that I was subjected to. I get that he's juxtaposing his own entries with the commentary of others to highlight the fact that things are rarely as we see or perceive them from our own perspective. But it really ruins the flow of the book. Personally, I would have preferred it if these remarks had been put into some sort of end-note with the option to go read it at whatever time I chose. I just felt like I was completely disengaged with Nikki, couldn't have any empathy for him and was sick of the whining about his mummy & daddy issues.

I didn't read this book because I have any fondness for Motley Crue - I really don't. I've always thought that they were just an annoyingly cliché, massively overrated rock group who played god-awful music and behaved like a bunch of tools. I decided to read it because a lot of people recommended it to me after I'd read some other titles to do with addiction and they also knew I liked published diaries. I figured I could put my dislike of the band aside and allow myself to see the man behind the headlines, as a flawed yet redeemable human being. But right from the get-go it was just so freaking dull. I didn't care what happened to him and I actually had to struggle to work my way through it.

I considered DNF-ing it at various points throughout the book, but when I complained to someone about this absolute piece of crap book they'd recommended to me, they told me to keep on with it because it gets a lot better in the end. And I will admit, it did improve a bit. I mean, it took him dying from an overdose and only just being brought back by some hard-working paramedics, to actually see that he was just being a selfish douchebag who was going to end up gone for good if he didn't sort his shit out. And credit to him where it's due, he did get clean (slipping up a couple of times is to be expected with addicts in recovery) got married, had some kids and to all intents and purposes seems to have been a great father to them. 

I mean, he still went and had an affair with the female drummer (after saying all through the book that CHICKS = TROUBLE and that nobody in the band was allowed to hook up with any of the other crew) got her to forgive him and was happy with her again for a while before they eventually divorced; so it's not like he's an angel or anything now. Not that he's at all trying to make out that he is one, it's just kind of annoying to read through this entire book, hating the writer the whole time, then to feel a little more compassionate towards the end as he starts to reveal more of that real human being I was hoping to see...only for him to go and let everyone down again. 

Is this book going to help anyone who's also an addict? I don't know. I've known a lot of addicts and to be honest, this book isn't going to tell them anything they don't already know themselves. People will choose to get clean, if and when they want to, and nothing anyone else can say - or write - will really change that. Maybe it'll put off those who are still flirting with the idea of plunging into the dark world of class A drug use? Maybe. But I can't help thinking that a lot of what was included in this book was just a huge excuse to brag about how outrageous and debauched Nikki and the rest of the band really were. That kind of stuff is probably better suited to an actual biography...not some alleged warning about the dangers of drug use. It does actually glorify a lot of what the band were up to...and I get it, they're young, famous, richer than they could ever have imagined and of course the excesses of the rock-star life are bound to appeal to them. And I'm not trying to moralise their behaviour or drug-use either; I think everyone has the right to do what they want to their own meat carcass and I'd be a complete hypocrite to try and criticise someone for doing drugs. I just don't feel like a lot of the content was included for any other reason that to remind people that 'The Crue' were the "baddest boys in the rock world". 

I'm glad he got his shit together in the end though and wish him nothing but success in continuing to stay sober. I can appreciate the charity he set up to help runaway children and I hope that continues to thrive as the years go by. But I'm never going to like Motley Crue (all the people trying to say that Nikki is an amazing lyricist are insane...there are snippets of lyrics all throughout the book...and they're all terrible, lol) and I'll never like Nikki Sixx. 

And I'm never going to recommend this book to anyone.

I.m. ruzz

I didn't have a lot of expectations for this book. I mean, Motley Crue wasn't exactly the height of deep thought and I didn't expect this to be either. 

Nikki Sixx offers no insight into life. nor the human condition, nor being a man. He even fails to give any meaningful insight into being a rock star. 

His biography fails to deliver anything of substance about who he really is, his motivations, or his feelings about his life. That's not to say it isn't rife with self loathing, whining, and a whole lot of pop psychology blame.

In the end, the only real value in the book is to read it as a parable about the perils of believing in the inner 'self' and moreover, the absolute destruction manifest by placing ones emotions in too high an order of life priorities. 

I think they could give this book to young Buddhist monks to study on the illusory nature of the ego and self. 

I will give some credit for the unsatisfying ending. The one that started out as a promise to be the best darn Nikki Sixx he could be and ended in another broken marriage, several failed musical ventures, and, of course, a few laps around the drug pool. 

I would call him a nihilist, but it's a hard sell because his own ideas of himself are so fractured and conjoined to what he's been fed by AA, Counselors, Psychiatrists and doting grandmothers he misses the entire point of nihilism.. a universe made of you, for you.

The Heroin Diaries A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star

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