After development on a feature film for New Line Cinema fell through, Stern secured a deal with Simon & Schuster in early 1993 to write a book.
The autobiographical chapters of the book were adapted into the 1997 feature film Private Parts, which starred Stern and his radio show staff playing themselves.
In January of that year, the show was syndicated to ten markets and had become the first to be number one in New York City, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia simultaneously.
[4] Stern accepted, partly for the "great advance" that was offered, which was estimated to be worth over $1 million, and that Simon & Schuster was a prestigious company.
[4][5] On March 23, 1993, Stern held a live press conference on his radio show to announce the deal and aimed for a release in October of that year.
[4] A major factor for Stern to write a book was due to his dissatisfaction with the number of times he had been misquoted or paraphrased in print or television, itself a reason why he resisted in granting press interviews.
[3] He saw the temptation in taking "three or four of my old bits" and adapting them into a book for a rush release, but he aimed for a quality product with strong material that would help him gain new fans.
Regan lived in Stern's guest house for six weeks over the summer of 1993 with her then two-year-old daughter and nanny to help complete the book on time.
[10][11] One of the researchers hired to work on the book transcribed segments of Stern's radio show and interviews with his parents to produce around 10,000 words of text for Regan to go through.
[10] Around the time of the book's announcement, Stern attempted to find his writing voice by sketching initial ideas onto paper and teaming with his radio show producer Gary Dell'Abate to retrace his career, emphasising on stories and anecdotes from behind the scenes.
"[3] Stern wrote the majority of the book in his basement office at his home on Long Island, New York, using his computer or dictating passages into a tape recorder.
[8] Stern was able to complete the book using a computer archive that he had a friend start nine years earlier, which indexed each radio show by subject matter and scans of every newspaper article about him.
[14][15] Stern wrote a chapter about the ongoing FCC fines against his radio show, "but it was so convoluted it wasn't going to make anyone laugh", so it was scrapped.
[11] Stern recalled the difficulty he had in reading it and entered a state of denial initially, before he realised there was a substantial amount of truth to what they had written.
[8][3] While writing the book, Stern asked Chaunce Hayden, editor of Steppin Out, to supply quotes about him from celebrity interviews published in the magazine.
[30] The strong sales were seen as reflection of his populist appeal to a middle-class white male demographic who compose a large part of the fan base of his show.
[34] The book received mixed reviews from critics, often drawing comparisons to Lenny Bruce's How to Talk Dirty and Influence People.
Private Parts drew favorable comparisons to Lenny Bruce and his book How to Talk Dirty and Influence People, but it was also characterized as nothing more than an extension of his radio show with little more to offer.
Another frequent criticism was that the material was juvenile, with little more to offer than stories of "breasts, behinds, penises, masturbation, defecation, and the expulsion of gas".
[42] The reliance on stories of body parts, functions, and human sexuality were also cited as a reason for what constituted the entirety of the book, and were not seen as compelling to some readers.