“Electric Circus.” Ed Mirvish. Little X. The Hooters downtown on Adelaide Street. Standup comedian Katherine Ryan’s memoir will be taken up eagerly by her many fans in Britain, but if you’re a Torontonian of a certain vintage, the middle third of “The Audacity” has a surprising number of Easter eggs just for you.
“And I believed the ‘Ed Mirvish killed my dog’ story for at least a decade,” the comic recalls on the phone from Britain. A bad ex-boyfriend (there were several) long insisted that the theatre/discount retail titan had driven over his pet, before Ryan discovered her man’s knack for tall tales.
Ryan herself doesn’t need to engage in such embellishments. Her droll book has a tart, breezy tone, but it doesn’t skip over her parents’ unhappy marriage, her own abusive and doomed relationships, cosmetic surgery mishaps, miscarriages, disease and a youthful brush with homicide. It’s a story that she elects to tells humorously, in other words, but it’s a long way from a farce.
“The Audacity,” out this week, details Ryan’s rise to U.K. fame and her Canadian life before that as a Hooters barmaid/Ryerson student, and before that her life as an attention-seeking schoolgirl in Sarnia.
“I think this book is a little bit of a love letter to Canada,” she said.
Comedian Katherine Ryan has written a memoir, “The Audacity,” which details her rise to U.K. fame and her Canadian life before that.
Jeff SpicerRyan, who had her own Netflix comedy, “The Duchess,” got her TV start in Toronto, as a dancer on the aforementioned MuchMusic dance program: “… it was common knowledge that this is what all the boys wanked to in desperation. It was exactly the kind of project I was looking to get involved in.”
The literary effort arose from a creative project rooted in the pandemic: suddenly deprived of live audiences, Ryan started a podcast, “Telling Everybody Everything,” and the feedback showed the way.
“Comedy is a two-way conversation; you can’t really have that just appearing on a screen and then the Zoom gigs were really demoralizing. So I started the podcast and people would email, and I found that I received a lot of emails about asking for relationship advice, asking for advice about body positivity or confidence … it shocked me how low their self-esteem was. And what I think they were tolerating in relationships reminded me a lot of myself in my 20s.”
As the title implies, the through-line is to encourage women, in particular, to believe that they mustn’t tolerate bad relationships and that they might be surprised at what doors sheer enterprise can open. It also contains a good-faith effort to mend a relationship of her own — with her hometown, which she often derided onstage (eg.: “We are the teen-cancer, teen-suicide and teen-pregnancy capital of Canada … we nearly lost teen suicide one year to St. Catharines, but then they had a really nice summer and we won”).
“Deep down I’m fond of the memories I made there,” Ryan writes. “I’m just sick of the boring narrative of people being humble about their roots. I find it much funnier to pick the fresh angle of being ungrateful instead … Not only do I relentlessly disparage my city but I’ve taken the extra step of targeting its most famous export: a widely respected astronaut called Chris Hadfield … It’s as ludicrous as if a British comic came for David Attenborough. (Makes mental note to come for David Attenborough.)”
The book’s release finds her in an unambiguously upbeat place: resuming touring, carefully, and cherishing her home life with her daughter, her husband Bobby Kootstra (her former high school boyfriend) and the couple’s new son Frederick, born in June. She’s polishing an upcoming TV project for Amazon, keeps in touch with celebrity news — John Mulaney, Kourtney Kardashian’s new boyfriend, the return of Bennifer — and has an open mind about visiting Canada and playing venues here.
She’s moved beyond comedy clubs and, when she lived in Toronto, she says, “I wasn’t cultured enough to even know about larger venues. Ed Mirvish Theatre? Well, I’m not setting foot in that dog killer’s establishment, but anywhere else.”
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