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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you needed me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to remove some of your own shame.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for close to 20 years, brought along her newly minted fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an distracting sound. The first thing you notice is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in whole sentences, and remaining distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s known for – a genuine, inherent fearlessness, a refusal of affectation and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was very good-looking and refused to act not to know it. “Attempting stylish or beautiful was seen as catering to male approval,” she states of the early 2010s, “which was the antithesis of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you performed in a stylish dress 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 comedy, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, needed someone to come along 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 flawed as a parent, as a partner and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is bold enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be nice to them the all the time.’”

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

The consistent message to that is an focus on what’s authentic: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the jawline of a youngster, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to slim down, well, there are medications for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll think about them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the root of how women's liberation is conceived, which it strikes me has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an impermeable sense of self which perish the thought you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the relentlessness of late capitalist conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a considerable period 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 exist in this space between confidence and shame. It took place, I discuss it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the humor. I love sharing confessions; I want people to confide in me their secrets. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so eager for it, but I feel it like a connection.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably wealthy or metropolitan and had a lively local performance musicals scene. Her dad ran an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they expected a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the sort of community where people are very pleased to live close to their parents and remain 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 grew up with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with Bobby Kootstra, 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 brought up 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, stylish, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she loved. These were the period working there, which has been another source of controversy, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she mentioned giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Manipulation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you absolutely were not expected to joke about it.

Ryan was amazed that her story generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something wider: a strategic rigidity around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, consent and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain remarks to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that distinct?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

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

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was told she had lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first informed about 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 ups and downs, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how extended life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The next bit sounds as nerve-wracking as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would take care of Violet in the day and try to make her way in comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware 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 felt sure I had comedy.” The whole circuit was shot through with discrimination – she won a major comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny