Heroin Diaries

“This was the beginning of the end. I knew I was either gonna die or get sober. I knew how to die. By then I’d had many secret overdoses and seizures so I understood where the line was and I was just inches from crossing it. The dying could be easy…it was the living that I didn’t know if I could do.”



Twenty years ago, Mötley Crüe bassist and principal songwriter Nikki Sixx was at the height of his fame and having a really bad year. Depressed and addicted to heroin, he managed to write in a diary on an almost daily basis, from December 1986 (“alone, naked, sitting by the Christmas tree, gripping a shotgun”) to December 1987 (wrenched from “death’s arms” by an assortment of paramedics and rock stars, including Slash from Guns N’ Roses). Then he began his journey toward sobriety and lost track of his diary until 2005, when he found it again in a storage locker. Much of its material had already been chronicled in The Dirt, Mötley Crüe’s classic 2002 autobiography with Neil Strauss, but Sixx decided to go public with the diary anyway because it offers a less celebratory, more cautionary look at the “personal hell” of drug addiction. Working with veteran music journalist Ian Gittins, Sixx created The Heroin Diaries, a darkly funny book that’s part journal, part scrapbook, and part oral history of his battles with his addictions, his band mates, his past, and one truly loopy ex-girlfriend (Prince’s former protégé Vanity).



The Heroin Diaries is occasionally repetitive (“drugs yes, alcohol yes, groupies yes, depression yes”), but it succeeds because the unstoppable Sixx—who’s also released a Heroin Diaries soundtrack album—keeps striking a nerve, if no longer a vein.



Click here to visit The Heroin Diaries on MySpace.