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‘Especially in this place, I believe you required me. You didn’t realise it but you required me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has been based in the UK for almost 20 years, was accompanied by her recently born fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting coherent ideas in full statements, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you notice is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of affectation and duplicity. When she emerged in the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for elegant or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she states of the that period, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a stylish dress with your underwear and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she explains breezily: “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 imperfect as a parent, as a partner and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the all the time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie 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 child 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 reduce, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how female emancipation is conceived, which I believe has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the male gaze; having an impermeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and allied to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, actions and missteps, they exist in this area between pride and embarrassment. It took place, I share it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; I want people to tell me their confessions. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a link.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or cosmopolitan and had a active amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have one another's children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable 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 another life where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, mobile. But we cannot completely leave behind where we came from, it seems.”

‘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 an additional point of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a establishment (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It breached so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Transaction? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her story caused controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a strategic inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the comparison of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it alike?’”

She would never have moved to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have rats there.’ And I found it difficult, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in sales, was found to have a chronic illness, which can sometimes make it challenging 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 darkest possibility. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many issues, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in standup in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was riddled with discrimination – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was created in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny