Quick Take
- Narration: Nikki Sixx reading his own work is the only way this material could possibly work, raw, unguarded, and at times uncomfortably intimate.
- Themes: Rock and roll mythology, addiction and survival, art as self-preservation
- Mood: Loud, bruised, and unexpectedly tender
- Verdict: A memoir that works precisely because it refuses to package its subject’s life into a redemption arc, opting instead for something messier and more honest.
I’ll be honest: I came to this one skeptical. Rock memoirs have a predictable arc, the excess, the fall, the recovery, the gratitude. After enough of them you can hear the beats coming from a chapter away. But This Is Gonna Hurt is a stranger, more personal book than that, and having Nikki Sixx narrate it himself shifts the experience into something that feels less like a polished memoir and more like sitting across a table from someone who has decided to tell you the truth.
The enhanced edition available in audio includes exclusive interviews and additional video content, which signals from the outset that this is meant to be experienced as a multimedia document rather than straightforward prose. Sixx had already established with The Heroin Diaries that he writes from the gut rather than the PR playbook. This follow-up is more expansive, part photo essay, part journal, part social commentary, and the audio format collapses those elements into a single continuous voice.
Photography as the Spine of the Story
The central tension in presenting this book as an audiobook is that photography is literally half the project. Sixx came to photography as a form of processing after near-death from an overdose, and his images of people on the margins, the unseen, the discarded, the resilient, are described throughout with a visual specificity that print readers can experience directly and audio listeners must reconstruct imaginatively. To his credit, Sixx’s narration is descriptive enough that the images don’t feel absent so much as suggested. He talks about his subjects the way a person talks about people they’ve actually spent time with, which says something about how he approaches the work.
What connects the photography sections to the memoir sections is a preoccupation with visibility: who gets seen, who gets ignored, and what it costs to insist on being seen as a full human being. That’s a theme that extends from his portraits of strangers back to his own story, including his early years with what the synopsis calls toxic waste circumstances and the Motley Crue years that followed. The book doesn’t resolve the tension between the rock star mythology and the damaged kid underneath it. It lets both coexist.
The Near-Death Chapter and What Comes After
The account of his overdose and clinical death is handled with restraint that surprises you. After the excess of the earlier chapters, the quiet around that event carries weight. Sixx doesn’t perform the drama of it. He describes it with a kind of detachment that is more affecting than any amount of narrated anguish would be. The recovery sections are similarly understated, not a conversion narrative, not a clean break, but a gradual reorientation toward making things rather than destroying them. Photography as a practice, music as a practice, eventually love and family as practice. It’s presented as ongoing rather than resolved.
One reviewer noted that the more you read his books, the more apparent his genius becomes across multiple disciplines. That’s a strong claim, but there is something genuine in it. The Heroin Diaries was Sixx-as-diarist. This book is Sixx-as-artist examining his own life as subject matter. The gap between those two postures is where the most interesting material lives.
Self-Narration and Its Particular Demands
Celebrity self-narration is a gamble. When it works, it adds irreplaceable authenticity: you hear the person’s actual relationship to the material. When it doesn’t, you get a famous person reading aloud without technique. Sixx falls into the first category. He’s not a trained reader, and there are moments where the pacing is rough or a passage feels stumbled through. But those imperfections serve the material in a way a polished professional narrator would not. The roughness is the point. This is a book about a man who survived things that should have killed him, narrated by that exact man, and the seams show in the best way.
At under four hours, the audio runs short compared to the physical book, which is substantially a visual object. Accept that limitation going in and what remains is a focused, intense document about the relationship between survival and making art. That’s a subject worth hearing in the voice of someone who has lived it at maximum volume.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Skip
Listeners who came to Sixx through The Heroin Diaries will find this a natural companion, different in form but consistent in its refusal to sanitize. Those coming purely as Motley Crue fans will find the music period less central than expected, since the photography work takes precedence. Listeners who need their memoir subjects to arrive at a tidy resolution may find the ongoing, unresolved quality of the narrative unsatisfying. Everyone else will find something worth their four hours.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to have read The Heroin Diaries first, or does this stand alone?
This stands completely alone. The two books share a sensibility and an author willing to be uncomfortable in print, but This Is Gonna Hurt has its own focus on photography and a different emotional register. Reading The Heroin Diaries first adds context but is not required.
Since the print edition is heavily visual, does the audiobook version feel incomplete?
It depends on your expectations. The audio version is a distinct experience rather than a degraded version of the print book. Sixx narrates his photographic work descriptively, and the exclusive audio interviews in the enhanced edition add material not available elsewhere. Think of it as a companion format, not a substitute.
How explicit is the content regarding drug use and addiction?
Fairly explicit and unvarnished, consistent with Sixx’s established approach in The Heroin Diaries. He doesn’t glamorize the addiction but doesn’t sanitize it either. Listeners who found The Heroin Diaries too raw may want to approach this one the same way.
Does the book address Sixx’s role as a songwriter and musician, or is it primarily about the photography?
The photography and visual art are central, but the music runs throughout as context and motivation. His identity as a songwriter and Motley Crue’s arc are present, but this is not a behind-the-music account. The focus is on Sixx as a visual artist and as someone reconstructing a life through creative work.
