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‘Especially in this country, I feel you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has been based in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an annoying sound. The initial impression you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can project motherly affection while crafting logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and hypocrisy. When she sprang on to the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or pretty was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a glamorous outfit with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m stunning,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, needed 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 spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is afraid of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the whole time.’”

‘If you performed in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a young person, you’ve most likely received treatments; if you want to lose weight, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped feeding,” she says. It gets to the root of how women's liberation is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and errors, they live in this space between pride and regret. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love telling people private thoughts; 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 eager for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not especially affluent or metropolitan and had a active amateur dramatics arts scene. Her dad managed an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was vivacious, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I go back 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 teenage boyfriend? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with an old flame, 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 cared for until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, portable. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we came from’

She did escape for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been another source of debate, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Exploitation? Prostitution? Unethical action? 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 surprised that her anecdote provoked controversy – she got on with the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward purity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in debates about sex, permission and abuse, the people who misinterpret the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating of certain statements to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated 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 hated it, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I was aware I had material’

She got a job in retail, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick 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 long life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had jokes.” The whole scene was permeated with bias – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny