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‘Especially in this nation, I believe you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her brand new fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they don’t make an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project motherly affection while articulating logical sentences in whole sentences, and without getting distracted.

The next aspect you see is what she’s famous for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and refused to act not to know it. “Aiming for glamorous or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the start of the decade, “which was the opposite of what a comic would do. It was a fashion to be humble. If you appeared in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ that would be seen as really off-putting, but I did it because that’s what I wanted.”

Then there was her comedy, which she describes casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a boob job and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be human as a mother, as a spouse and as a picker of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the whole time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an focus on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to lose weight, well, there are drugs for that. “I’m not on any yet, but I’ll consider them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It addresses the core of how feminism is viewed, which it strikes me hasn’t really changed in the past 50 years: liberation means appearing beautiful but never thinking about it; being widely admired, but avoiding the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever modify; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the relentlessness of modern economic conditions. All of which is sustained by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a long time people reacted: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be controversial all the time. My personal stories, actions and errors, they live in this realm between satisfaction and regret. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love sharing private thoughts; 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 eager for it, but I view it like a link.”

Ryan grew up in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics 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 driven person. She dreamed of leaving from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live close to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really recognizable to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own first love? She traveled back to Sarnia, met again Bobby Kootstra, 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 lone parent. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s an alternate reality where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, chic, worldly, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it turns out.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we originated’

She got away for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the Hooters years, 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 fired for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her routines where she talked about giving a manager a sexual favor in return for being allowed to go home early. It violated so many red lines – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 anecdote generated outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a deliberate inflexibility around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was performed chastity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that dissimilar?’ I thought: ‘How is it similar?’”

She would not have come 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 disliked it, because I was instantly poor.”

‘I felt confident I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was told she had a chronic illness, 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 darkest possibility. My reasoning with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven't separated 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 succeeded in get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as white-knuckle as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to enter standup in the evening, taking her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had belief in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says simply, “I was confident I had comedy.” The whole industry 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 conceived in the context of a ongoing debate about whether women could be funny