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‘Especially in this country, I feel you craved me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to lift some of your own embarrassment.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while forming logical sentences in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The following element you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of pretense and hypocrisy. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be humble. If you performed in a stylish dress with your underwear 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 wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; 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 alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It addresses the core of how feminism is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but without ever thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed 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 controversial all the time. My life events, choices and mistakes, they reside in this area between confidence and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing confessions; I want people to confide in me their private thoughts. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so keen for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or metropolitan and had a active community theater arts scene. Her dad owned an engineering 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 kind of town where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable 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 went out with 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 a different path where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we came from’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the Hooters years, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she discussed giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many taboos – what even was that? Manipulation? 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 were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something broader: a calculated rigidity around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in discussions about sex, agreement and abuse, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her then boyfriend. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I disliked it, because I was immediately struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in business, 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 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 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 change. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry was riddled 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