The Sunday Times Magazine • 25refusing to let a man anywhere near her and Violet’s
life (as explored in her Netflix show The Duchess), to
married with a baby. Her husband, Bobby, was her first
boyfriend back in Sarnia. They met at school and started
dating when they were about 15. A year later he dumped
her at a party when he was drunk and they lost contact,
but when Ryan was in Canada filming an episode of
W ho Do You Think You Are? they reconnected on social
media, went for a drink and took it from there. “I’m glad.
If we’d stayed together I would probably have a ton of
his kids, be living in a small town, and I don’t think we
would get along as well as we do now, having had the
time to make all these terrible mistakes.”F
red is nearly a year old and still breastfeeding
— although he likes his milk pumped and
chilled. He and Ryan sleep together in a
bedroom on the top floor, with Bobby
relegated to a downstairs room. In the
Amazon show Ryan refers to herself as a
“dad”, celebrating the notion that having
a stay-at-home husband means that she has
the freedom to go out and work, but the
reality is more complicated. “The way I raise
my children is unsustainable — looking at
him all day long, hanging out with him all day
long.” She has just hired her first nanny, Miriam, who
comes three days a week, but Ryan still finds it hard
to hand the baby over. From the outside one would not
say that having a baby has in any way impeded her
professional juggernaut. Fred was appearing on panel
shows with her when he was ten days old, lying placidly
on her lap while she delivered cutting one-liners with
impeccable make-up. She started touring Missus in
October, when Fred was four months old.
She feels guilty, though, that her show was not as
well prepared as usual. She says she conceives her
stand-up “like a map”, with subjects she knows she
wants to cover as waymarkers, bullet points and
punchlines that she writes into her phone. “Usually
you would do open-mike nights, try out ten minutes,
20 minutes, you build it that way. But with this, for the
first night I just had all this paper in the car on the way
to Crawley.” Yet the show has had rapturous reviews.
Like many working parents, Ryan says she has no
time for herself — but would like more babies. She
would also like to get rid of her implants once she has
finished breastfeeding (with Violet she breastfed for
two years). This is mostly because she thinks her fake
breasts look dated. “They are very emblematic of theNoughties, very out of fashion.” Without them, she
says, she will have “no boobs whatsoever, boy nipples ...
The reason I wanted breast implants was because I had
almost a deformity I felt.” But now she says her personal
aesthetic is more Kendall Jenner than Jessica Simpson.
Ryan has been disparaged for not being enough of
a feminist, particularly when she presented the
NME awards in 2020 and was the subject of sexual
comments from the rapper Slowthai, but refused to
condemn him, insisting that the whole thing had
been entertainment, that they were just in character.
“What [feminism] is for me might be different from
what it is for someone else, and that’s fine with me. But
I feel like there are such hot-button issues in feminism
right now that we are very divided on — I try not to
engage on those issues too much, there is time to
listen.” She is talking about gender identity and trans
rights. There are also generational divides: we both
have teenage daughters, and I suggest it is useful to
engage with the perspectives of our children when
it comes to such subjects. Ryan agrees, but has a caveat.
“You also have to listen to your mother. We are a very
interesting generation because such huge leaps have
been made between our mothers and our daughters.
Your daughter will have a very woke, altruistic outlook
and a lot of what she says will be right, but she hasn’t
lived through some of the dangers. I feel like no one
can exist in a vacuum of their own rights. If someone
says to my mother, ‘Women don’t exist,’ that’s the
worst thing you could say to her — she really doesn’t
like that because she had to really fight to exist.”
Ryan’s mother, Julie, now has her own podcast,
Jewels Says, and likes to send Ryan glamorous
photographs of herself, the frames of which she
decorates with fake jewels. These images populate
a table on the upstairs landing alongside a picture
of Ryan from her happy Hooters days.
When I leave, Ryan has been transformed for the
photoshoot; fully made up, wearing a vast Marie
Antoinette-style tulle gown, with jangly earrings the size
of saucers. “Sorry, I wanted to drive you to the station,”
she says, standing stiffly in her over-the-top get-up. “You
can’t drive in that outfit,” I reply. “Oh yes I can,” she
insists, and I believe her — pretty and soft, subversive
and strong; Katherine Ryan is all of the above nBackstage with Katherine Ryan launches on Prime
Video on June 9. Ryan is currently touring the UK
with Missus; livenation.co.ukRyan, far left, with
her mother and
younger sisters,
Kerrie, top, and
Joanne, in Ontario,
Christmas 1997.
Below: at the NME
awards in 2020 with
the rapper SlowthaiLOW-RESCOURTESY OF KATHERINE RYAN, GETTY IMAGES