When Janey Godley walks into the basement bar of the Underbelly, the warren of hip performance spaces that lies beneath Edinburgh's public library, she instantly makes her presence felt.
 
"Where are your cakes?" she demands to know of the sheepish staff, mock-outraged at the sight of so many healthy baps. "You've got to have cakes!"

The most outspoken female stand-up in Britain, and the most ribald and refreshing comedy talent to have risen from the slums of Glasgow since Billy Connolly, Godley, 45, is also a former pub landlady: she ran an establishment called The Weavers in the Calton, one of the city's toughest districts, for 15 years.

Perfect preparation, she says, for the crowd-control requirements of her new trade. Short, plumpish but not to be messed with, she doesn't suffer fools or drunks - or, indeed, cake shortages - gladly.

Nor does she suffer the legacy of extreme poverty, sexual abuse, domestic violence, and the brutal murder of her beloved "mammie" in silence.

When she started incorporating real-life revelations about her traumatic upbringing and turbulent adulthood into her act at the festival three years ago, people couldn't quite believe what they were hearing.

None of her many male peers could tell stories half so harrowing, while at the same time serving up dram after dram of unembittered hilarity.

A book deal swiftly followed, and the resulting, utterly compelling autobiography Handstands in the Dark has become a word-of-mouth phenomenon - ranked at No 20 in the WH Smith non-fiction bestseller list a fortnight after its publication in paperback.

If you want the full low-down these days on the abuse she suffered at the hands of her uncle, the day her mother was found in the Clyde, or the gangster family she married into, it's to her un-putdownable book you must turn.

Puffing away on menthol cigarettes, Godley says she hates the idea of repeating herself, of becoming some kind of freakshow turn. If people ask her about the extreme stuff, she'll usually oblige, but there's no fixed formula behind her live material.

As if to prove that she's much more than the sum of her misfortunes, she's brought three shows to the Fringe this year.

Janey Godley's Blog - Live! consists of free-flowing chat based on the incident-crammed internet blog about her life (including an uproariously entertaining anecdote about kissing George Clooney at this year's Bafta awards); Square Street brings her together with her 20-year-old daughter Ashley, a film student, for some bawdily eccentric low-life character skits; and The Point of Yes is a monologue in which Godley relives a few chapters of her life while switching into the raddled version of herself that might have been had she succumbed, like many others - including her brother Mij - to heroin.

Hard work? Not when you've worked round the clock in a pub. "I hear these comedians who are doing one hour a day going, 'Ooh, I'm so stressed!' To me, this is a holiday!" Her no-nonsense in-laws all laugh at her: "They say, 'I can't believe you're making money just talking."
Even when she was running the pub, she used to channel her creativity into am-dram extras. "I used to write plays and get the customers to act them out. I'd work the scripts so that, as soon as I came out of character, I could go straight back behind the bar."

She ran comedy nights, too, but had to be cajoled into taking part in an open-mic competition at the Tron theatre 10 years ago.

She won hands-down, and when the opportunity arose to develop her comic gifts (the pub was raided by the police and found to contain a cache of guns - another story entirely), she seized it.

It's drama and acting she'd like to do more of - yet she's a comedy natural and her writing is sensationally good.

Both talents are marked by a profound lack of sentimentality, a refusal to shift into self-pity that's partly down to her own indomitable character and partly her upbringing. "Where I come from, no one takes other people's pain seriously," she says.

Her shows can be a bit rough round the edges. During the Little Britain-ish Square Street, there's a lot of conspiratorial corpsing and back-stage giggling.

But Godley is amiably defiant: "I don't like slick, pre-set comedy. Because I'm damaged, I like damaged goods the best."