Early Life
Nilsen was born at 10 High Street, Strichen, Fraserburgh, Aberdeenshire, to a Scottish mother, Betty Whyte, and a Norwegian father, Olav Magnus Moksheim, who adopted the surname Nilsen. His father was an alcoholic and his parents divorced when he was four years old. His mother remarried and sent her son to his grandparents, but after a couple of years he returned to his mother. Nilsen claimed the first traumatic event to shape his life came about when he was a small child, when his beloved grandfather died of a heart attack in October 1951. His strict Catholic mother reportedly insisted that he view the body before burial. Nilsen's father moved back to Norway, where he died. Nilsen was a beneficiary of the estate.
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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