Katherine Ryan on Feminism, Achievement, Criticism and Fearlessness.

‘Especially in this country, I think you required me. You didn't comprehend it but you required me, to alleviate some of your own guilt.” The performer, the forty-two-year-old Canadian comic who has made her home in the UK for nearly 20 years, brought along 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 remarkable capacity of this woman, who can fully beam motherly affection while forming sequential thoughts in full statements, and without getting distracted.

The following element you see is what she’s renowned for – a authentic, unapologetic audacity, a refusal of pretense and contradiction. When she emerged in the UK alternative comedy scene in 2008, her provocation was that she was exceptionally beautiful and didn’t pretend not to know it. “Attempting stylish or attractive was seen as man-pleasing,” she recalls of the early 2010s, “which was the reverse of what a comedian would do. It was a fashion to be modest. If you performed 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 material, which she explains casually: “Women, especially, required someone to come along and be like: ‘Hey, that’s OK. You can be a feminist and have a cosmetic surgery and have been a bit of a slag for a while. You can be imperfect as a mother, as a significant other and as a selector of men. You can be someone who is fearful of men, but is self-assured enough to criticize them; you don’t have to be deferential to them the entire time.’”

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

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 youngster, 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 look into them when I’ve stopped nursing,” she says. It gets to the root of how female emancipation is viewed, which in my view remains largely unchanged in the past 50 years: liberation means looking great but never thinking about it; being constantly sought after, but never chasing the male gaze; having an solid sense of self which heaven forbid you would ever surgically enhance; and coupled with all that, women, especially, are meant to never think about money but nevertheless thrive under the pressure of current financial conditions. All of which is kept afloat by the majority of us pretending, most of the time.

“For a while people said: ‘What? She just talks about things?’ But I’m not trying to be challenging all the time. My experiences, actions and errors, they exist in this realm between pride and shame. It happened, I talk about it, and maybe catharsis comes out of the jokes. I love revealing secrets; I want people to share with me their confessions. I want to know missteps people have made. I don’t know why I’m so thirsty for it, but I view it like a bond.”

Ryan was raised in Sarnia, Ontario, a place that was not notably affluent or urban and had a lively community theater theater scene. Her dad managed an engineering company, her mother was in IT, and they expected 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 type of place where people are very happy to live next door to their parents and stay there for a long time and have their friends' children. When I visit now, all these kids look really known to me, because I grew up with both their parents.” But she later reunited with her own high school sweetheart? She returned 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 cared for 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, chic, cosmopolitan, portable. But we cannot completely leave behind where we originated, it appears.”

‘We can’t fully escape where we started’

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 another source of debate, not just that she worked – and liked the job – in a topless bar (except this is a myth: “You would be dismissed for being undressed; you’re not allowed to take your shirt off”), but also for a bit in one of her sets 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? Manipulation? Transaction? Unethical action? Lack of solidarity (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 surprised that her story generated anger – she was fond of the guy! She also wanted to go home early. But it exposed something broader: a deliberate absolutism around sex, a sense that the price of the #MeToo movement was demonstrative chastity. “I’ve always found this interesting, in discussions about sex, permission and manipulation, the people who don’t understand the subtlety of it. Therefore if this is abuse, why isn’t that abuse?” She mentions the comparison of certain comments to lyrics in popular music. “They said: ‘Well, how’s that different?’ I thought: ‘How is it comparable?’”

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 hated it, because I was suddenly struggling.”

‘I was aware I had comedy’

She got a job in retail, was diagnosed an autoimmune condition, which can sometimes make it difficult to get pregnant, and at 23, made the decision to try to have a baby. “When you’re first diagnosed something – I was quite sick at the time – you go to the most negative outcome. My logic with my boyfriend was, we’ve had so many problems, if we are still together by now, we never will. Now I see how lengthy life is, and how many things can transform. But at 23, I couldn’t see it.” She managed to get pregnant and had Violet.

The subsequent chapter sounds as high-pressure as a classic comedy film. While on maternity leave, she would look after Violet in the day and try to break into performance in the evening, bringing her daughter with her. She was aware from her sales job that she had no problem winning people over, and she had faith in her fast thinking from her time at Hooters; more than that, she says plainly, “I knew I had comedy.” The whole scene was shot through 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 persistent debate about whether women could be funny