TORONTO - Outspoken Canadian comedian Russell Peters says he didn't want to hide anything when crafting his new memoir, "Call Me Russell," out this week.

But when his wife, Monica Diaz, read an early draft that mentioned the wild sexual romps he'd experienced during his rise to fame, she grew upset and so he snipped some of the titillating tales.

"There was another version and my wife read it and started crying," the Brampton, Ont.-raised comic -- who married Diaz in August and is expecting a child with her in February -- admitted in a recent interview.

"I was like, 'This was before you,' and she was like, 'Ya, but I didn't need to see it, I didn't need to know about it,' and I'm like, 'I'll fix it.'

"So we scaled it back and so you've got the very abbreviated version of it."

Peters says he also decided not to write about a couple of unsavoury characters he's encountered in his life.

"There's a guy that has stolen material from me; I didn't want to put his name in the book," he said.

"There's a guy who's a complete sociopath who's obsessed with me -- he's threatening all kinds of stuff -- and I won't give him any ink. He doesn't deserve it.

"The guy's just mental. Like, literally out of his mind. I have a friend who told me that this guy dreams about killing me."

Still, Peters is very candid in the book, opening up about his attention deficit disorder and being bullied as a child, expressing disappointment with some of his onstage performances, and revealing that some of his TV-development deals haven't panned out because producers wanted him to "act more Indian."

He also writes that he received death threats over his old "Toronto Maple Sikhs" joke that he no longer performs, and that he sold drugs for a brief period as a teen.

"Call Me Russell" is also an inspirational story about how Peters, 40, rose to fame with an ethnically charged brand of humour that has sold out arenas from London to Sydney to Los Angeles and earned him high-profile fans including the King of Jordan.

Born in Toronto, Peters says he was a latch-key kid who loved rap music, boxing and DJ'ing and was close with his Anglo-Indian immigrant family who has served as the inspiration for some of his material.

His older brother, Clayton (who is also his manager and co-wrote the memoir with him and with screenwriter Dannis Koromilas), protected him when he faced racial slurs as a child.

At age 19, Peters first tried his hand at standup comedy on someone's suggestion and immediately loved it.

He slogged it out on the standup circuit for about 16 years -- at first performing for peanuts at venues including a seafood restaurant and a mini-putt place -- before a 2005 YouTube clip of his "Comedy Now!" special catapulted him to global superstardom.

Peters says he never got into the business for the money and he's never felt that fame has changed him.

"The success thing, it didn't really sink in when it first started moving along. And then when we started getting bigger and better things and then the hype started building back home, because I didn't live here anymore, I wasn't really seeing the hype," said Peters, who has homes in Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

"So in my head I'm still the same guy and I come back and everybody else is treating me different and it was an adjustment for me."

Peters also writes extensively about his close relationship with his father Eric, who died of cancer in March 2004.

He says he talks aloud to his dad's spirit every night before he goes onstage and gets nervous if he doesn't feel goosebumps during his chat.

"Physically, he never got to see what happened with my career," said Peters, who was ranked by Forbes magazine as one of the Top 10 highest-grossing standup comics in the U.S. for 2009, and has sold over 250,000 units of his DVDs "Outsourced" and "Red, White and Brown."

"I really believe that he can see it all and I feel that he's responsible for it all, but at the same time I kind of wish I could see his reaction to it."

Peters says he never thought his life story would be interesting enough for a book, and he only did the memoir after publishers approached him.

Now that the book's completed, he realizes it may help encourage kids whose parents discourage them from pursuing a life in show business.

"It'll give you some sort of inspiration because here's a kid from Brampton who never really thought anything would come out of -- not that anything bad would happen in my life -- but I didn't think anything great would happen in my life," he said.

"I thought I would have a good life, you know ... I would work my job and it's all I knew, it's all I saw -- people going to work 9 to 5 at factories or whatever and having a modest life. It's what I would've expected and I would've been happy with that too.

"But I don't know how it happened but here we are, 21 years later, and I've got a book out telling you about my life."

Peters' upcoming projects include his Green Card Tour across the U.S., the film "Breakaway," which he just finished shooting in Toronto, and the upcoming DVD release of a show he taped at London's O2 Arena in front of 29,000 people.

He'd also like to host the Juno Awards again, and has a deal for a sitcom that he hopes will lead to a more stable lifestyle after his child is born.

Parenthood, he says, likely won't change the course of his career but it'll probably change the subject matter he presents onstage.

"I talk about my life experience and if my life experience now is a wife and a child, then that's a different experience. It's going to be very new to me."