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‘Especially in this country, I think you required me. You weren't aware it but you craved me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” Katherine Ryan, the 42-year-old Canadian comedian who has made her home in the UK for almost 20 years, brought along her brand new fourth child. She removes her breast pumps so they don’t make an distracting sound. The first thing you see is the remarkable capacity of this woman, who can radiate motherly affection while crafting sequential thoughts in full statements, and never get distracted.

The next aspect you observe is what she’s renowned for – a natural, unaffected ballsiness, a rejection of artifice and duplicity. When she burst onto the UK comedy scene in 2008, her challenge was that she was exceptionally beautiful and made no attempt not to know it. “Attempting glamorous or attractive was seen as appealing to men,” she remembers of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a norm to be humble. If you went on stage in a stylish dress with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m fabulous,’ that would be seen as really unappealing, but I did it because that’s what I liked.”

Then there was her comedy, which she summarises casually: “Women, especially, craved someone to appear 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 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 afraid of men, but is bold enough to mock them; you don’t have to be nice to them the entire time.’”

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

The underlying theme to that is an insistence on what’s true: if you have your child with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a youth, you’ve most likely undergone procedures; if you want to reduce, 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 gets to the root of how female emancipation is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: empowerment means being attractive but not dwelling about it; being universally desired, but without pursuing the attention of men; having an solid sense of self which perish the thought you would ever alter cosmetically; and in addition to all that, women, especially, are expected to never think about money but nevertheless succeed under the demands of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a long time people went: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My life events, behaviors and mistakes, they exist in this realm between pride and shame. It took place, I talk about it, and maybe relief comes out of the punchlines. I love revealing private thoughts; I want people to tell me their secrets. 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 was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a active local performance arts scene. Her dad owned an industrial company, her mother was in IT, and they demanded a lot of her because she was bright, a driven person. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the type of place where people are very content to live next door to their parents and stay there for a lifetime and have their friends' children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I spent my childhood with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, met again 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 raised until then as a single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s a different path where I didn't make that, and it’s still just Violet and me, stylish, worldly, flexible. But we can’t fully escape where we came from, it appears.”

‘We are always connected to where we started’

She got away 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 enjoyed working – in a topless bar (except this is a inaccuracy: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to remove your top”), but also for a bit in one of her sets where she mentioned giving a manager a blowjob in return for being allowed to go home early. It crossed so many taboos – what even was that? Abuse? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Unsisterliness (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 generated outrage – she liked the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it cracked open something larger: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative purity. “I’ve always found this notable, in discussions about sex, permission and exploitation, the people who misinterpret the nuance of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the equating 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 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 found it difficult, because I was instantly broke.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed lupus, which can sometimes make it hard to get pregnant, and at 23, chose to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the worst-case scenario. 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 extended life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I was unaware.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as high-pressure as a tense comedy film. While on time off, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into comedy 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 sharp humor from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I felt sure I had comedy.” The whole scene was permeated with bias – she won a prestigious comedy award in 2008, just over a year after she’d started performing, a prize that was established in the context of a turgid debate about whether women could be funny