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‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an annoying sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while articulating logical sentences in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of artifice and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting elegant or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her routines, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, required someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your underwear and heels, that would be seen as really off-putting’

The underlying theme to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It addresses the root of how feminism is viewed, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but avoiding the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is maintained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and errors, they live in this area between satisfaction and shame. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the humor. I love telling people confessions; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially wealthy or metropolitan and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very pleased to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected with an old flame, who she saw as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had raised until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, worldly, mobile. But we are always connected to where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been an additional point of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence generated outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a calculated absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in debates about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I felt confident I had jokes’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many ups and downs, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on time off, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled with sexism – she won a notable comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a persistent debate about whether women could be funny