The one famous ex-boyfriend who’s not in Bonnie McFarlane’s memoir

Bonnie McFarlane celebrated the release of her first book, You’re Better Than Me: A Memoir, on Tuesday night at the Strand Book Store in New York City, in conversation with Jim Gaffigan.

And if you can ever get a comedian with two best-selling books and a successful TV series to help you launch your memoir, by all means, do that. That goes double if your book includes a foreword by star chef/author/TV host Anthony Bourdain — who not only suggested McFarlane write a book, but published it under his imprint at HarperCollins.

McFarlane’s new book covers her youth and early days and nights in comedy in Canada, becoming BFFs with Lynn Shawcroft, and culminating in her American breakthrough as a finalist on the second season of NBC’s Last Comic Standing — where she competed against her future husband, Rich Vos. They’ve been married since 2005 and have a daughter, as well as a fun podcast, My Wife Hates Me. But as McFarlane explained to Gaffigan and the audience at her book-reading and signing at the Strand, she didn’t include all of her previous relationships in this memoir.

“They took out one whole chapter,” McFarlane told Gaffigan. “It was a good chapter! It was the only famous person that I ever dated.”

Gaffigan: “Who was that? Garry Shandling?”

“It was Nathan Fillion. It was Nathan Fillion.”

“Oh, Nathan Fillion. I saw him on Talking Dead.”

“I thought it was a good chapter because I went on a date with him, and I went to this guy’s birthday party who I worked with, who invited me to his birthday party, and Nathan had been at a party. He’d called me. And then on the other line, the guy called. ‘You’re supposed to be at my birthday party. Where are you?’ I said, ‘Nathan, I’ve got to go, I’m supposed to go to this birthday party, and then I was like, ‘Well, do you want to come with me?’ And he was like, ‘Yeah!’ And he picked me up, and we went to the guy’s birthday party, and it turned out the guy, the party was at somebody else’s house, and I was supposed to be the date of the birthday boy. So I brought a date to a date.”

“Uh oh,” Gaffigan replied. “That’s not an ideal birthday present.”

“But Nathan was so – and it was also, a very small party. It was somebody’s house. And his aunts and uncles were there. Somebody was throwing babies up in the air, and stuff. I was in the hall being yelled at by the birthday boy. And Nathan, I look over, and he had been on a soap opera, so all the moms that were there were surrounding him, and he was kissing cheeks. He was beloved, and they were all evil-eyeing me. This is all not in the book.”

“But it’s in an episode of Castle,” Gaffigan quipped. “Have you seen an episode of Castle? I haven’t.”

“I’ve never seen it, but every time he comes on TV, I have to force myself not to tell Rich, ‘I slept with that man.’”

Buy Bonnie McFarlane’s “You’re Better Than Me: A Memoir””

Sean L. McCarthy

Editor and publisher since 2007, when he was named New York's Funniest Reporter. Former newspaper reporter at the New York Daily News, Boston Herald and smaller dailies and community papers across America. Loves comedy so much he founded this site.

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