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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you craved me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has lived 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 first thing you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can radiate maternal love while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The second thing you notice is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the start of the decade, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you performed in a elegant attire with your lingerie and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really alienating, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her routines, which she describes 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 slag for a while. You can be flawed as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to slag them off; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your lingerie and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an insistence 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 young person, you’ve most likely had tweakments; if you want to reduce, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It gets to the heart of how feminism is conceived, which in my view hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: freedom means appearing beautiful but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be provocative all the time. My experiences, choices and errors, they exist in this space between satisfaction and embarrassment. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to tell me their private thoughts. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly wealthy or urban and had a vibrant amateur dramatics musicals scene. Her dad ran an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a perfectionist. She wanted to escape from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very content to live nearby to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I return now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again an old flame, who she dated 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 haven’t done that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we cannot completely leave behind where we started, it turns out.”

‘We are always connected to where we originated’

She managed to leave 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 found it fun – in a topless bar (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances 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? Exploitation? Transaction? Unethical action? Unsisterliness (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 amazed that her fellatio sequence generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost 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 nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have relocated to London in 2008 had it not been for her partner at the time. “Everyone said: ‘Don’t go to London, they have vermin there.’ And I disliked it, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had material’

She got a job in sales, was found to have an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite unwell at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale 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 alter. But at 23, I didn't realize.” She succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to make her way in performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She felt from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had confidence in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I was confident I had jokes.” The whole scene was shot through 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