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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you needed me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own embarrassment.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they avoid making an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate parental devotion while crafting sequential thoughts in complete phrases, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s known for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a dismissal of affectation and duplicity. When she sprang on to the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be elegant or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she states of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be imperfect as a parent, as a significant other and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

‘If you performed in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the profile of a young person, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; 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 breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how women's liberation is conceived, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, choices and errors, they exist in this realm between pride and embarrassment. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know missteps 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 particularly affluent or urban and had a active amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was sparky, a high achiever. She wanted to escape 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 remain there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really familiar to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? 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 raised until then as a lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, urban, flexible. But we are always connected to where we started, it turns out.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we started’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a establishment (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 sets where she discussed giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Transaction? Unethical action? 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 surprised that her anecdote generated anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, consent and abuse, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come to London in 2008 had it not been for her romantic interest. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in sales, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven't separated by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had belief in her sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole industry was shot through with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny