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‘Especially in this nation, I feel you required me. You didn’t realise it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the 42-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, has brought her recently born fourth child. She takes off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The initial impression you notice is the incredible ability of this woman, who can project maternal love while forming logical sentences in complete phrases, and never get distracted.

The following element you observe is what she’s known for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a rejection of artifice and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her statement was that she was very good-looking and made no attempt not to know it. “Trying to be stylish or pretty was seen as catering to male approval,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comic would do. It was a trend to be self-deprecating. If you appeared 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 routines, which she describes breezily: “Women, especially, craved someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a advocate for equality and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a spouse and as a chooser of men. You can be someone who is wary of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be pleasant to them the whole time.’”

‘If you took to the stage in your little push-up bra and heels, that would be seen as really alienating’

The drumbeat to that is an insistence on what’s authentic: if you have your baby with you, you most likely have your breast pumps; if you have the jawline of a youth, you’ve most likely had tweakments; 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 feeding,” she says. It gets to the core of how female emancipation is conceived, which I believe remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: empowerment means appearing beautiful but without ever thinking about it; being widely admired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever alter cosmetically; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless prosper under the pressure of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us bullshitting, most of the time.

“For a while people reacted: ‘What? She just discusses things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, behaviors and missteps, they exist in this area between satisfaction and shame. It happened, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the jokes. I love telling people 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 keen for it, but I sense it like a link.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not particularly affluent or cosmopolitan and had a lively amateur dramatics theater scene. Her dad owned an technical company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was sparky, 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 next door to their parents and live there for a considerable period and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But isn't it true she partnered with her own teenage boyfriend? She traveled back to Sarnia, caught up with her former partner, 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 lone parent. “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, flexible. But we are always connected to where we originated, 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 adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been a further cause of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a myth: “You would be fired for being nude; you’re not allowed to be unclothed”), but also for a bit in one of her performances where she talked about giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many boundaries – what even was that? Abuse? Prostitution? Unethical action? Betrayal (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you certainly were not meant to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it revealed something wider: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the cost of the #MeToo movement was performed purity. “I’ve always found this fascinating, in arguments about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who fail to grasp the complexity of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She brings up the equating of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Certain people said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would not have come 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 found it difficult, because I was immediately broke.”

‘I knew I had material’

She got a job in sales, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, decided to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite ill at the time – you go to the darkest possibility. My rationale with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we haven’t split up by now, we never will. Now I see how long life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I was unaware.” She was able to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as white-knuckle as a chaotic comedy film. While on parental leave, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into standup in the evening, carrying 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 bluntly, “I knew I had material.” The whole industry was riddled with sexism – she won a notable 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