An alcoholic father, a drug-addicted mother and a sexually-abusive uncle...Janey Godley has made sense of her life by laughing at it. Now she's tipped for a Perrier at this year's Edinburgh Festival. Bruce Dessau meets her.

The first time I met Janey Godley she was backstage at the 2003 Edinburgh Festival and she was explaining how she'd just sliced her finger open. Anyone else might have rushed to A&E, but not this pocket-sized Glaswegian dynamo. She simply sealed the wound with Superglue and went on with the show. But then, as she says at the top of her website, 'Janey Godley is not your average comedian.'

She is not your average 44-year-old, either. Godley's life takes in murder, child abuse and extreme poverty. Yet she has turned a turbulent existence into a great act. Like Billy Connolly, she simply walks on stage and spins out umpteen autobiographical anecdotes, laced with mordant wit. "I'm the epicentre of disaster," she chuckles in her fruity accent. "Other people run away from trouble, I run towards it."

Her next Edinburgh show, previewing in London this week, reflects her tendency to attract trouble. It is entitled Janey Godley Is Innocent. "It's about the fact that I was accused of swearing when I was on Channel 4's Kings of Comedy series. The authorities assumed it was me because I'm Glaswegian and loud. It's also about the fact I thought I killed my friend's dad because I shot him in the arse with a slug gun when I was 11 and two years later he had a heart attack, My brother said the slug had moved through his veins."

Our latest meeting is behind the Comedy Tent at Glastonbury. Godley is in guerrilla-gig mode. She is not billed, but is on call in case anyone fails to make it through the mud. "I'm the comic who doesn't drink or do drugs, so I'm always on standby. I went on and told the hippies to give their babies iPods and a private education, not mung beans and wooden toys."

It is heartening to discover that Godley is so sorted. Her early years, documented in her autobiography, Handstands in the Dark, sound gruesome. Her father was an alcoholic, her mother was addicted to tranquilisers and she was routinely raped by her uncle. On her 16th birthday she left school because she didn't have any shoes. Then, while working as a barmaid in the brutal Calton district, she married a member of one of the city's criminal families.

She and husband Sean didn't want to be involved in crime and opened their own pub. "We had a lot of laughs. It was like a real-life version of TV's Shameless."

Hard graft set them up financially, but she was unfulfilled. Then, in the mid-Nineties, a friend suggested she try stand-up. "I was always the person telling stories in the pub, so it seemed a natural step to take."

Janey and Sean have been married for 25 years. In their early years together cheap heroin flooded Calton and she saw 26 friends die. Her brother became addicted and is now HIV-positive. Godley resisted. "I never took drugs. If I did, my husband would have killed me. It would have destroyed the very fabric of his life to see me do that to myself."

It is not the most conventional of relationships. Sean takes little interest in her career. "He says, 'If you were a secretary, I wouldn't come and stare at you typing.' The only thing we have in common is that we both like sex and money." There was never a chance that he would write her book in the way that Pamela Stephenson wrote the biography of her spouse Billy Connolly, who had a similarly eventful Scottish upbringing. "If Sean wrote my biography he'd just say, 'She talks too much and doesn't let me listen to the radio. The end.'"

Putting her story on paper was therapeutic. "The bits that were hard to write weren't the abuse. It was remembering the few good times, like the day I went to the beach with my mum." Despite her problems, her mother was clearly a character. "She knew everyone. You couldn't walk down the street without people stopping her all the time." After her parents' separation, her mother was murdered by a boyfriend.

It is hard to believe that Godley is not psychologically scarred, but apart from a protective attitude towards her 19-year-old daughter Ashley, she seems unscathed. "I baffled the therapists. They kept asking, 'Are you angry about the abuse?' I said, 'No.'" You can either carry that pain and let them have power over you for ever or get over it. I got over it." Eventually her abusive uncle was imprisoned in Barlinnie prison. On his first night inside his arms were broken.

Godley is a unique talent. She seems so comfortable on stage one can't help wondering if she regrets not getting into stand-up when younger. "I couldn't have done it back then. I had to live my life to get to this bit. I had to have this journey. If I'd become a comedian back then I would have become a nutter."