Michael Cannistraci has lived many lives: a devout Pentecostal son, bartender, cab driver, actor and dancing pickle, among others. In The Sinner Amongst Us, he shares his journey of reinvention, describing the terrors of being adopted into a home riddled with mental illness and violence. He became a working actor, despite the opposition of his family and church. Trying to escape his childhood role models of toxic masculinity, he struggles to understand how to be a good man, and confronts his own demons of addiction and vanity.

He presents us with his youth, including an attempt to defend his family with a gun at eight years old, a confrontation with a pedophile a few years later, and a love affair at seventeen with an exotic dancer. He gives us a guided tour into the surreal and ridiculous world of acting, recounting work misadventures: lying about his horseback riding skills for a beer commercial, being interrogated by police while dressed as Count Dracula, and taking down a chorus line with his less than stellar dance skills.  The essays zigzag over America’s geography. He tells a story of friendship amid the struggles to survive during AIDS epidemic New York City and the lessons he himself learned while teaching ESL to refugees from Russia. In his later years, he navigates  the terrors of doing social work during the  pandemic, being a ceremonial attendant for an Ayahuasca sect, and reckoning with a life-threatening medical crisis.

His memoir in essays offers, with humor and sensitivity, his desire to understand himself, and what it truly means to sin, to forgive, and be forgiven.