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‘Especially in this place, I think you craved me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The primary observation you observe is the awesome capability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while forming logical sentences in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s famous for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a dismissal of pretense and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be glamorous or attractive was seen as catering to male approval,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I enjoyed.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a promiscuous person for a while. You can be human as a parent, as a spouse and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is confident enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, well, there are treatments for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the heart of how feminism is understood, which it strikes me remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of late capitalist conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, actions and mistakes, they live in this space between confidence and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe reprieve comes out of the jokes. I love telling people confessions; I want people to tell me their secrets. I want to know errors people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a bond.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a vibrant community theater theater scene. Her dad managed an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was vivacious, a perfectionist. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live next door to their parents and live there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own high school sweetheart? She returned to Sarnia, reconnected 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 cared for until then as a solo mom. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, urban, mobile. But we can’t fully escape where we started, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she enjoyed. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of controversy, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being topless; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she mentioned 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? Exploitation? Sex work? Predatory behavior? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was surprised that her anecdote caused anger – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something larger: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, agreement and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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 pests there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in sales, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite unwell 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to enter comedy in the evening, carrying her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem being convincing, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole industry was riddled with sexism – 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 turgid debate about whether women could be funny