If Democratic New York Senator Kirsten Gillibrand was vying for votes in D.C., she’d likely win them with this jab in her new book slamming Arlington as a “soulless suburb.”

Here’s the excerpt from Off The Sidelines: Raise Your Voice, Change The World via ARLnow.com:

We started having the same argument over and over. I’d say, “What’s wrong?”

Jonathan would say, “I have no job and I hate D.C.”

I appreciated Jonathan’s viewpoint. We lived in a soulless suburb. It wasn’t the right place for us, and we needed a change. I could see that, but it took me at least a year to figure out that racing 100 miles an hour to do my job well was leaving no time for us…Eventually we moved from Arlington, Virginia, to Capitol Hill, and Jonathan found a job he liked.

Admittedly, not every sliver of Arlington is soulless. Rosslyn, yes, is very much soulless. But certain establishments in Clarendon demonstrate some level of soul. Shirlington has good theater. Virginia Square, well, yeah, that’s also probably without a soul. We’ve contacted some of Gillibrand’s people to see where in Arlington she actually lived so we can determine if her assessment is accurate.

We’ll update this when we hear back.

In the meantime, good luck winning Arlington in 2016.

UPDATE, 5:25 p.m.: Gillibrand has quasi-apologized, sort of, via Twitter.

Photo by Ron Cogswell via Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0

Note: This post originally attributed the excerpt to Talking Points Memo. ARLNow first reported this information.