Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Success, Negative Reviews and Audacity.

‘Especially in this place, I think you required me. You weren't aware it but you needed me, to remove some of your own guilt.” The comedian, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has lived in the UK for close to 20 years, was accompanied by her newly minted fourth child. Ryan whips off her breast pumps so they won't create an irritating sound. The primary observation you observe is the incredible ability of this woman, who can fully beam maternal love while articulating sequential thoughts in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The second thing you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she burst onto the UK stand-up scene in 2008, her statement was that she was strikingly attractive and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Aiming for stylish or pretty was seen as appealing to men,” she recalls of the that period, “which was the opposite of what a funny person would do. It was a trend to be modest. If you went on stage in a elegant attire with your little push-up bra and heels, like, ‘I think I’m gorgeous,’ 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 simply: “Women, especially, needed someone to arrive and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a enhancement and have been a bit of a party-goer for a while. You can be flawed as a parent, as a spouse 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 pleasant to them the all the time.’”

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

The drumbeat to that is an emphasis on what’s real: if you have your infant with you, you most likely have your feeding equipment; if you have the profile of a young person, 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 look into them when I’ve stopped breastfeeding,” she says. It touches on the core of how feminism is understood, which in my view has stayed the same in the past 50 years: liberation means being attractive but never thinking about it; being universally desired, but never chasing the attention of men; having an unshakeable sense of self which God forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and allied to all that, women, especially, are supposed to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the demands of modern economic conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us being dishonest, most of the time.

“For a considerable period people went: ‘What? She just speaks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My personal stories, actions and missteps, they live in this space between satisfaction and regret. It occurred, I share it, and maybe relief comes out of the humor. I love sharing secrets; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know mistakes people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I sense it like a connection.”

Ryan spent her childhood in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or metropolitan and had a active local performance theater scene. Her dad ran an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they anticipated a lot of her because she was bright, a high achiever. She longed to get out from the age of about seven. “It was the kind of town where people are very happy to live nearby to their parents and remain there for a long time and have one another's children. When I go back now, all these kids look really known to me, because I was raised with both their parents.” But didn’t she marry her own high school sweetheart? She went back to Sarnia, caught up with 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 single mother. “Right,” says Ryan. “Sometimes I think there’s another life where I avoided that, and it’s still just Violet and me, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, flexible. But we are always connected to where we came from, it appears.”

‘We cannot completely leave behind where we originated’

She managed to leave for a bit, aged 18, and moved to Toronto, which she adored. These were the time at the restaurant, which has been another source of discussion, not just that she worked – and found it fun – in a venue (except this is a misconception: “You would be let go for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), 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 violated so many taboos – what even was that? Exploitation? Sex work? Inappropriate conduct? Lack of solidarity (towards whoever it was who had to stay late so she could leave early)? Whatever it was, you definitely weren’t supposed to joke about it.

Ryan was shocked that her fellatio sequence provoked outrage – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something wider: a strategic absolutism around sex, a sense that the consequence of the #MeToo movement was outward modesty. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, agreement and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She references the linking of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “Some individuals said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

She would never have moved 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 found it difficult, because I was suddenly poor.”

‘I knew I had comedy’

She got a job in business, was found to have lupus, which can sometimes make it challenging to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first told you have something – I was quite sick 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 lengthy life is, and how many things can alter. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The following period sounds as nerve-wracking as a chaotic comedy film. While on time off, she would care for Violet in the day and try to break into comedy in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She knew from her sales job that she had no problem persuading others, and she had faith in her quickfire wit from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says bluntly, “I knew I had material.” The whole scene was shot through with bias – 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny