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‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in full statements, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you observe is what she’s renowned for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises simply: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It touches on the heart of how female emancipation is understood, which I believe hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My life events, choices and missteps, they reside in this realm between confidence and embarrassment. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love sharing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or urban and had a active community theater theater scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have their friends' children. When I return now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She returned to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, who she saw as a teenager, and now – six years later – they have three children together, plus Violet, now 16, who Ryan had brought up until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, portable. But we are always connected to where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the period working there, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many boundaries – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Predatory behavior? Unsisterliness (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her fellatio sequence generated controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something broader: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in debates about sex, consent and exploitation, the people who fail to grasp the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for 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 winning people over, and she had confidence in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with bias – 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 ongoing debate about whether women could be funny