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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they avoid making an irritating sound. The first thing you observe is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while crafting logical sentences in full statements, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s famous for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of pretense and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting elegant or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s true: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how feminism is understood, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they exist in this space between confidence and embarrassment. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the punchlines. I love telling people secrets; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially prosperous or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was sparky, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and remain there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, met again 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 cared for 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, chic, worldly, portable. But we are always connected to where we originated, 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 Hooters years, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), 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 crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her story provoked anger – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals 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 pests there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was told she had an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. My logic 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 alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole industry was shot through with sexism – she won a prestigious 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